Who was Alfie Evans?
What was the row over his treatment?
Alfie was born on 9 May 2016, and admitted to hospital in December 2016 after suffering seizures. He had been a patient in the hospital ever since. He died on 28 April 2018.
The hospital’s doctors and independent medical experts agreed that there was no cure for the boy’s rare, undiagnosed degenerative neurological condition.
However, Roger Kiska, a solicitor at the Christian Legal Centre which is supporting Mr Evans, disagreed with the Medical experts, saying there could be a cure.
Who do you trust for a medical opinion?
- A group of independent doctors?
- A solicitor?
At the end of an emergency high court hearing, that lasted three hours, the judge, Mr Justice Hayden, ordered Alfie’s parents to engage with doctors and create a palliative care plan that could involve moving him off the paediatric intensive care unit where he has spent the past 16 months of his life.
This would allow his parents to spend time with him, and that it was not the time for more legal manoeuvres.
The judge also said that Alfie’s undiagnosed degenerative condition had “almost entirely wiped out” his brain matter, which was now little more than water and cerebrospinal fluid.
In a High Court judgement of 11 April 2018, the judge remarked that “by the end of February 2018 the connective pathways within the white matter of the brain which facilitate rudimentary sensation — hearing, touch, taste and sight, had been obliterated. They were no longer even identifiable on the MRI scan”. The High Court backed an end-of-life care plan drawn up by medical specialists attached to Alfie Evans’s case.
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