2011: Disgraced pathologist Charles Smith stripped of medical licence.
Dr. Charles Randal Smith was long regarded as one of Canada's best in forensic child pathology. A public inquiry was called after an Ontario coroner's inquiry questioned Smith's conclusions in 20 of 45 child autopsies.
In 1992, the Ontario Coroner's Office created a pediatric forensic pathology unit at Hospital for Sick Children and Smith was appointed director. He had become almost solely responsible for investigating suspicious child deaths in Ontario including the deaths of all children in Ontario's care.
In 1999, a Fifth Estate documentary singled him out as one of four Canadians with this rare expertise.
For more than a decade, Mr. Smith enjoyed a stellar reputation as the country's leading pathologist when it came to infant deaths giving lectures to law enforcement, medical students and other coroners. Several complaints about his work had little effect.
https://youtu.be/f5-53FhGQ5A
In this period he conducted hundreds of autopsies and testified in court multiple times. He conducted training sessions for lawyers on how to examine and cross-examine expert witnesses, and training for law-enforcement and medical staff on detecting child abuse.[5]
The inquiry, led by Justice Stephen Goudge and concluding in October 2008, found that Smith "actively misled" his superiors, "made false and misleading statements" in court and exaggerated his expertise in trials.
Far from an expert in forensic child pathology, "Smith lacked basic knowledge about forensic pathology," wrote Goudge in the inquiry report.
While at Sick Children's Hospital, Smith lived on a farm in Newmarket. His marriage collapsed around the time that his pathology work at Sick Children's received heavy scrutiny.[4] Smith was briefly relocated to Saskatoon and since 2007, he has lived in Victoria, British Columbia, with partner Dr. Bonnie Leadbeater, director of the Centre for Youth and Society at the University of Victoria.
A 2008 inquiry on Smith’s work condemned his “flawed approach” and noted the he “lacked the requisite training and qualifications” to work as pediatric forensic pathologist.
Smith’s findings had helped convict more than a dozen people, some of whom spent years in prison and lost access to their children.
For 24 years, Smith worked at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. In the hospital's pediatric forensic pathology unit, he conducted more than 1,000 child autopsies and never found anything strange about hundreds of children in care or having some contact with the children's aid society dying every year in Ontario.
But Smith no longer practices pathology. An Ontario coroner's inquiry reviewed 45 child autopsies in which Smith had concluded the cause of death was either homicide or criminally suspicious.
The coroner's review found that Smith made questionable conclusions of foul play in 20 of the cases — 13 of which had resulted in criminal convictions. After the review's findings were made public in April 2007, Ontario's government ordered a public inquiry into the doctor's practices.
"Smith was adamant that his failings were never intentional," Goudge wrote. "I simply cannot accept such a sweeping attempt to escape moral responsibility."
"Dr. Smith expressed opinions ... that were either contrary to, or not supported by, the evidence," Ms. Silver told the hearing Tuesday, reading from an agreed statement of facts.
Smith had been in search of his own personal truths. He was born in a Toronto Salvation Army hospital where he was put up for adoption three months later. After years of looking for his biological mother, he called her on her 65th birthday. But she refused to take his call.
Smith's adoptive family moved often. His father's job in the Canadian Forces took them throughout Canada and to Germany. He attended high school in Ottawa, and graduated from medical school at the University of Saskatchewan in 1975.
"Workers found human tissue in disgraced pathologist's office, inquiry told."
Tom Blackwell, CanWest News Service Published: Monday, December 17, 2007.
TORONTO - A secretary who worked alongside Dr. Charles Smith for years says she found a bag of dried human tissue, a dish containing bones and a child's hospital bracelet during one of her frequent searches of the pathologist's ramshackle office.
Maxine Johnson, an administrative co-ordinator at Sick Children's Hospital, told a public inquiry on Monday she once had pictures taken of the chronically messy office to try to prod Smith to keep his quarters neater. It did not work, she said.
It was during a 2005 audit of tissue samples requested by the chief coroner's office that Johnson and a colleague made the unusual discoveries in the pathologist's room.
"We found some dried-out tissue in plastic bags ... skeletal bones in another little dish," she said.
As well, they discovered a bead bracelet of the kind given to young patients at hospital.
Court of Appeal Justice Stephen Goudge is leading the inquiry into how the use of faulty forensic pathology evidence by Ontario prosecutors may have led to as many as 13 people being wrongfully convicted of killing children.
Johnson also related her attempts to get him to issue reports on surgical cases and autopsies more quickly, as doctors, coroners, police and relatives called incessantly for results. In one case, doctors had waited more than a month for pathology results on a biopsy of a live patient, urgently needed to help determine whether the child should receive radiation treatment.
Smith complained to others that he did not have enough secretarial support, but that was not the case, Johnson testified.
"We were always available and if Dr. Smith would simply give us the work, we would get (the reports) out," she said. "He loved to type them himself ... He wouldn't give them to us."
The consequences of Smith's cluttered existence at the hospital came to the fore as lawyers sought to review what is known at the inquiry as the Valin case.
William Mullins-Johnston had been convicted of murdering his niece largely on Smith's evidence. His conviction was overturned last month.
Defence lawyers were looking for tissue samples from the case so their pathologist could examine them. They were traced to Smith, but he did not know where they were.
Johnson and others set about scouring his office for them, found one on the first day, then another 20 two days later, in the same spot in the office where she had looked earlier.
She said Monday she assumed they had been placed there by someone after her first search, something she found "kind of strange."
Despite it all, however, Johnson called Smith a "great guy" with whom all the secretaries liked to work.
National Post
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/porchlightcanada/dr-charles-smith-inquiry-t2479.html?t=2479
http:// (DEADLINK) www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=09ff97ef-b41b-4352-b535-636da8a5ee9a&k=16571
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/02/29/like-a-god-dr-charles-smith-left-poisoned-trail-behind-him_n_9350124.html
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/disgraced-pathologist-charles-smith-stripped-of-medical-licence/article578634/
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2019: Ontario coroner getting data for massive analysis of child and youth deaths.
TORONTO – An Ontario youth court judge has granted the coroner’s office access to justice records that will be reviewed as part of a pilot project looking into thousands of deaths of children and young adults in the province.
Chief Coroner Dirk Huyer told Justice Sheilagh O’Connell on Tuesday that more than 7,000 people aged 10 to 24 years old have died in Ontario between 2007 and 2018. He said the project was an effort to better understand the factors at play.
“It’s very important research, so I commend you for this,” O’Connell said as she granted the coroner’s office access to the records.
READ MORE: More needs to be done to protect kids in Ontario’s child welfare system, coroner says
Huyer said outside court that one area of focus for researchers will be the more than 3,000 children and young people who died due to suicide or gun violence.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW:
https://globalnews.ca/news/6249678/ontario-coroner-child-youth-deaths-data/
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DEATH AND SERIOUS BODILY HARM REPORTS
2019-2020 ANNUAL REPORT
Children’s aid societies and licensed residential service providers are legally required to inform the Ombudsman’s Office within 48 hours of any death or serious bodily harm of any child who has sought or received services from a children’s aid society within the past 12 months. Because they must be filed within 2 days of the incident, these reports may involve preliminary information and not findings of investigations by the police, child protection authorities or the coroner.
Submitted online through a secure portal on our website, the purpose of these reports is to provide data that we review and analyze regularly to identify potential systemic issues; they are not the same as complaints or emergency calls, although we do flag any cases that require follow-up.
From May 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020, we received 1,663 reports about 1,433 incidents (some reports were duplicates, from multiple agencies reporting the same incident). These reports related to 122 deaths and 1,473 cases of serious bodily harm (defined as any situation where a young person requires treatment beyond basic first aid, including for physical, sexual or emotional harm). The Ombudsman will report in more detail on our analysis of these statistics in future reports.
TOP CASE TOPICS
1,458 Children’s aid societies
240 Youth justice centres
139 Residential licensees
26 Secure treatment
https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/resources/reports-and-case-summaries/annual-reports/2019-2020-annual-report
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2009: Why did 90 children die?
https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2009/02/23/why_did_90_children_die.html
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A CHILD IN CARE IS A CHILD AT RISK.
Between 2008/2012 natural causes was listed as the least likely way for a child in Ontario's care to die at 7% (only 15 children) out of the total deaths reviewed while "undetermined cause" was listed as the leading cause of death of children in Ontario's child protection system at 43% (92 children) of the total deaths reviewed over a four year period. The rest of the deaths were categorized as homicide, suicide and accidental.
http://www.mcscs.jus.gov.on.ca/english/DeathInvestigations/office_coroner/PublicationsandReports/PDRC/2013Report/PDRC_2013.html
http://www.mcscs.jus.gov.on.ca/sites/default/files/content/mcscs/images/195633-19.jpg
Undetermined means those 92 children had no pre-existing medical conditions and there was no rational reason for them to have died.
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2015: Teen’s death raises questions about secrecy surrounding kids in care.
“It is stunning to me how these children... are rendered invisible while they are alive and invisible in their death,” said Irwin Elman, Ontario’s former and last advocate for children and youth. Between 90 and 120 children and youth connected to children’s aid die every year.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/12/10/teens-death-raises-questions-about-secrecy-surrounding-kids-in-care.html
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2016: The ministry doesn’t know how many children are being cared for in Ontario’s 389 licensed group homes. It’s working on a system that will eventually allow it to collect the information.
At the end of September 2017, the group homes had 2,914 beds, almost one-third of them operated by private, for-profit companies. The rest are run by non-profit agencies such as children’s aid societies.
Another 2,005 beds were in foster homes run by companies, where the limit is four kids to a home. A growing number of kids are also being placed in unlicensed homes with live-in staff.
“There are lots of kids in group homes all over Ontario and they are not doing well — and everybody knows it,” says Kiaras Gharabaghi, a member of a government-appointed panel that examined the residential care system in 2016.
“You know your system is based on the flimsiest of foundations when you have absolutely no standards on who can do this work,” adds Gharabaghi, director of Ryerson University’s school of child and youth care.
https://www.mykawartha.com/news-story/7974974-kids-are-going-through-trauma-staff-are-getting-assaulted-we-are-all-in-the-trenches-together-/
https://www.mcgill.ca/socialwork/channels/news/report-calls-better-oversight-residential-services-young-people-ontario-260997
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