The Sunday Times is permitted to name the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust in its reporting on allegations of fabricated or induced illness (‘FII’), the condition formerly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
Sunday Times reporter Emily Dugan had already published three articles about FII, including the increase in FII allegations made by hospitals against parents and the impact of this on families. Her reporting also raised concerns about the 2021 Guidelines produced by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
The underlying proceedings concerned an application for a care order by a Local Authority, alleging a young child was subjected to FII whilst in hospital: [1]. In a judgment published online yesterday, Mrs Justice Lieven gave reasons for granting a Transparency Order which permitted the NHS Trust to be named. Some findings of note were that:
- There was plainly a legitimate public interest in reporting how the Family Court tests allegations of FII and applies the 2021 Guidelines. The proposed reporting fell within the open justice principle, and could be contrasted to Re HMP[2025] EWCA Civ 824: [47].
- There was a limited risk of jigsaw identification of the child if the Trust was named: “the reality is in very many cases that there is a cohort of people, whether friends, parents at the school gate or in the local community, people in the same ward, who will know or guess who the child in the report is, but that in itself is not a ground to refuse the order sought.” [43].
- The risk of demonstrations at the hospital was “highly speculative”. Cases of FII could be contrasted to cases of young children being, or not being, allowed to die, where demonstrations and targeting of professionals can have a real impact on the working of a hospital: [46].
This is thought to be one of the first published judgments to consider the interaction between PD 12R (previously the Transparency Pilot) and the Supreme Court’s recent approach to the Re S balancing exercise in Abbasi v Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust [2025] UKSC 15.
Hope Williams acted for the Sunday Times, instructed by Brid Jordan of the Times Legal Department.
The judgment is available here: A Local Authority v A Mother & Ors [2025] EWHC 3498 (Fam).