Rupert Fawdry: obstetrician whose fascination with computerised medical records soon turned to disappointment

Abstract

Obstetrician and gynaecologist Rupert Fawdry was an original thinker, dismissed by some as a Luddite and acclaimed by others as a maverick genius. If computers had been invented first, he suggested, paper and pen might have been considered the greatest IT breakthrough since the dawn of civilisation. This may seem an odd and even illogical observation by a charming eccentric who had an “affair” with the computer, according to his Canadian born first wife Judy. This passionate, obsessive affair reflected a love of structure and an overwhelming desire to organise the world—in particular, medical records. Fawdry highlighted dozens of inconsistencies in some 70 maternity datasets. The Körner model, for example, lacked an option for a breech birth by caesarean, he said, while the “place of birth” option seemed to differ in each dataset. Perhaps it was the depth of his knowledge and experience that ultimately made him appreciate the limitations of computerised medical records in obstetrics and care of the elderly. He was, despite boundless zeal, a pragmatist. He told a parliamentary committee in 2003: “Sadly, time and again, I have found myself helplessly watching the almost …