The Lake Alice Hospital Child and Adolescent Unit: Accountability - The Response to Date

In the 1970s Dr Selwyn Leeks, a registered psychiatrist set up a child and adolescent unit in the grounds of Lake Alice Hospital, a New Zealand psychiatric facility. The adolescents were not diagnosed as having mental disorders but were placed there for behavioural issues. They were controlled by "aversion therapy" and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy treatment, paraldehyde injections and other forms of abuse. A number of complaints followed, which led to Government inquiries and reports. In 1999 a class action was commenced which was settled by the Government making "ex gratia" payments and issuing apologies. Dr Leeks relocated to Australia and continued to practise. He was the subject of complaints and proceedings. In 2006 he surrendered his practising certificate. The New Zealand Police have declined to prosecute Dr Leeks. A complaint was taken to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. This was upheld in 2019.

Pharmacological treatment of neonatal seizures: a systematic review

Pharmacologic treatment options for neonatal seizures have expanded over the past 2 decades, and there is no consensus on optimal treatment strategy. We systematically reviewed the published literature to determine which medication(s) are most effective for treating neonatal seizures, by retrieving trials and observational investigations via PubMed (through August 2011) that focused on pharmacological seizure treatment of neonates (≤ 28 days old) and utilized continuous or amplitude-integrated EEG to confirm seizure diagnosis and cessation. Our search identified 557 initial articles and 14 additional studies after reference reviews, with 16 meeting inclusion criteria. Of these, 2 were randomized trials and only 3 additional investigations included comparison groups. We found limited evidence regarding the best pharmacologic treatment for neonatal seizures, but were able to devise a treatment algorithm from available data. These findings have the potential to serve as a clinical reference and to inform the design of comparative effectiveness investigations for neonatal antiepileptics.