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NHS England and NHS Sussex have just published the report of their independent patient safety investigation into the WellBN clinic Brighton. The investigation report is so shocking it’s difficult to know where to start to catalogue the list of failures, from the reckless disregard for safeguarding to the dangerous prescription of life changing drugs. The report’s conclusion was that the care at WellBN “Fell far short of what could be considered safe or appropriate.”

NHS England needs to ask why parents’ concerns and questions about the safety of the clinic were ignored for years. As the Brighton parents who have been fighting to be heard say “The children identified in the WellBN investigation cannot be given back the years in which these questions should have been asked.”

One thing we can say for certain from reading through the report of failings at the WellBN clinic is that this is not medical care. It’s not healthcare. What WellBN practised was “gender affirming care.”

The findings of this report show that the WellBN clinic was a model of the practice of gender affirming care.

In this model all that matters is that the child is affirmed as ‘trans.’ Normal professional standards of diagnosis, formulation, professional qualification, safe prescribing, record-keeping, safeguarding and informed consent are simply not taken seriously, if at all. It’s a model so heavily invested in one explanation and one outcome that normal duty of care is seen as either dispensable or a form of gatekeeping.

From the report, this is a summary of the potential harms caused to the children seen at the WellBN practice:

All of these are a feature, not a bug, of gender affirming care.

We saw the same in the independent investigations into the Tavistock GIDS and the NHS adult gender clinics. The Cass Review and the Levy Review both exposed similar failings to the WellBN clinic. What links them all is the gender affirming care model.

What matters in the gender affirming care model is that children are affirmed, socially and medically, as ‘trans kids’, proof if any were needed that it is ideology being served, not children. It is the activist narrative that was performed at WellBN: the assumption that children are trans and will become trans adults:

96. There appears to be no evidence that, whilst the children were receiving medical intervention at the Practice, gender incongruence was ever considered or discussed as a transient phenomenon that may resolve with increasing age.

Of course it wasn’t. Nor were children supported to understand the possibility that they may grow up to be gay, not trans, in WellBN’s information given on sexual development:

97. This did appear to be considered in terms of distress caused by pubertal change, but clinicians appeared to fail to support young people as they sought to understand their emerging sexuality and sexual orientation. There is no evidence on the records/associated correspondence and messaging that beliefs, expectations and hopes around future relationships and sexual relationships were discussed.

We also see the kind of lies and misinformation spread by activists repeated at WellBN:

94. The records and correspondence also contain the repeated inaccurate and misleading claim that any impact of gender medication on fertility was completely reversible.

Activists have inevitably greeted the ban on the prescription of hormones at WellBN (from 31 July) with outrage. It is revealing that their anger has not been directed towards the substandard care at the clinic and the subsequent risks to the safety of the children treated.

The satement from TransActual doesn’t recognise any shortcomings of the service at WellBN.

We are disturbed to learn that trans young people receiving gender-affirming care through WellBN recently received a letter announcing that their access to endocrine care will be withdrawn at the end of July.

For over-16s, this will mean being referred into an NHS CYP gender service with no guarantee of being able to continue gender-affirming hormone treatment.

The Good Law Project says “Trans children are being denied gender affirming healthcare” and that “this will have extremely harmful effects, possibly the most harmful imaginable” – the usual threat used by activists to get what they want. GLP says “Their attempt to forcibly detransition young trans people is a moment of deep national shame” and they have set up a crowdfunder to fund private prescriptions through Susie Green’s project Anne Health (one of the unregulated providers NHS England specifically warns against in its guidance for GPs) for at least 10 former WellBN patients (we won’t link to this).

There is no concern that these children have received reckless and unsafe care at WellBN, no demand to improve that care.

Compare this with what the regional medical director for NHS England in the South East had to say, as reported by Brighton and Hove News:

“It is clear from the independent report published today that children and young people were put at risk of harm because of the actions of some practitioners at the WellBN practice who provided specialist diagnosis, care and treatment that they were neither qualified, nor commissioned to deliver by the NHS – under no circumstances should this have happened.”

NHS England needs to understand that the reaction of activists tells us all we need to know about trans ideology and the gender affirming care model they promote: normal rules don’t apply.

Activist clinicians will not change their beliefs because of the shocking findings of this report. They will dig in and dismiss the evidence as they did with the Cass Review. Brighton WellBN will happen again and more children and young people will be harmed unless NHS England rejects the gender affirming care model as unsafe and takes action to ensure this model is not being used in any NHS services.

We are still waiting to hear the judgment in the permission hearing on the judicial review application against the WellBN practice which is being brought by a Brighton parent. There will be many more legal challenges against NHS England, the regulators and the Secretary of State if action is not taken urgently to root activist ideology out of the healthcare system altogether.