The staff at Gosport War Memorial Hospital in the U.K. had a nickname for the Daedalus Ward. They called it the “Dead Loss” ward because so many of the patients assigned to it died untimely deaths. From 1989 to 2000, it’s also where medical staff at the hospital pursued a mercenary policy of euthanasia, killing patients by administering overdoses of opioids and other drugs in what a recently issued independent investigation into the hospital’s practices called an “institutionalized regime.”

The panel found “a disregard for human life and a culture of shortening the lives of a large number of patients” at the hospital. As the Right Reverend James Jones, KBE, the head of the investigatory panel, notes, “The shocking outcome of the Panel’s work is that we have now been able to conclude that the lives of over 450 patients were shortened while in the hospital.” Some critics have suggested the number is much higher.

Many of the victims were admitted to the hospital with recoverable conditions such as a broken bone. Elsie Devine was one such patient; the 88-year-old grandmother went to Gosport to recover from a mild infection; a few weeks later, she was dead, the victim of a powerful and medically unnecessary cocktail of fentanyl and diamorphine. The same was true of 78-year-old Ethel Thurston; sent to Gosport to recover from a fractured femur, she was labeled “aggressive” by nursing staff because she wouldn’t eat the hospital food and “has been known to strike staff.” Nurses noted her treatment: “Syringe driver started diamorphine 90 mg. Midazolam 20 mg.” She was dead by that evening.

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