Children as young as 12 prescribed gender transition hormones by a rogue GP practice. Why did the authorities allow it to go on for years despite knowing it was happening?
JUNE 21, 2026
The result of the year long investigation into the Brighton WellBN GP practice was reported last week. Hannah Barnes produced an excellent report on this in the New Statesman. Hannah has been writing about this issue for several years, including in her book Time to Think.
Children as young as 12 have been prescribed masculinising and feminising hormones on the NHS to help them medically transition to another gender. The findings were made by a year-long independent investigation into the activities of a Brighton-based GP surgery, WellBN. The investigation examined the “poor and disorganised” medical notes of 78 children in receipt of either sex hormones, drugs to block their puberty, or both, from the practice. (Hannah Barnes)
It’s important to note that the investigation only looked at children currently being prescribed hormones by WellBN. It did not look at the hundreds of other children who were prescribed hormones there in previous years and who are now older teenagers or young adults. This is an important piece of work that needs to be done so these young people can be followed up and offered appropriate advice.
CAN-SG has previously reported on this issue and documented the authorities’ failure to investigate complaints about WellBN.
There was abundant evidence that multiple health authorities, including the General Medical Council (GMC) and NHS England, as well as NHS Sussex had been aware of concerns relating to these same practices dating back at least five years. At both a national and local level, the NHS knew that WellBN had been prescribing outside of all NHS guidelines for young people, and yet no one took meaningful action.
In another article on the CAN-SG website in August 2025 Protecting Children: The NHS Sussex Controversy Rachel Cashman, founder of PHSEBrighton, argued for an independent inquiry, citing previous failures in safeguarding and leadership within NHS governing bodies, in order to restore public trust.
The investigation into WellBN was launched by NHS Sussex in 2025 and, to its credit, seems to have been trully independent. Its conclusions were damning.
It found that children were given “wholly inadequate” assessments; capacity to consent to life-changing treatment was only evidenced in a handful of cases; safeguarding risk and safety assessments were inadequate; and children and their families were “not appropriately informed of the impact of medication” on future fertility. Some parents of 16-year-olds were not aware that their child had been prescribed these drugs. Care “fell far short of what could be considered safe or appropriate”.
(Hannah Barnes)
In a 2025 article when the investigation was launched, Hannah Barnes said:
Whatever the outcome, should this investigation find that any child has been harmed as a result of WellBN’s medical approach to gender-questioning youth, none of the organisations responsible for protecting these young people and ensuring they receive safe care will be able to say it could not have been prevented. Not the NHS, not the GMC, nor the government. They were warned. Repeatedly. And did nothing.
Sadly it was the threat of legal action that led to the review. Why does it take the threat of legal action to get the NHS and the GMC to take their responsibilities seriously to protect children from harm? Why should it be up to distressed parents to do all this work when it is the job of the authorities to protect children? Who will be held accountable for these failings?
Had action been taken sooner – when concerns were first raised – many young people’s health would not have been put at risk by the dangerous practices at WellBN.
Clearly, it would be wrong to place all the blame on Dr Sam Hall, the GP at the centre of this scandal. (The investigation mentions several other GPs and prescribers involved, but Dr Hall was the main one).
You just need to listen to this interview where Dr Hall describes anyone who questions medical transition of minors as “fascists” to realise we are dealing with someone who seems to have lost all objectivity, or connection with reality.
Hall was driven by conviction and zealotry, plausibly harming patients while passionately believing they were being helped. It is the job of cooler heads in the various commissioning and regulatory authorities to identify and stop rogue doctors acting on their bizarre and harmful beliefs. That is supposedly the role of the General Medical Council – to protect patients – yet it ignored complaints. It’s also the job of those who commission and fund NHS services to ensure they are being delivered to appropriate standards and following national guidelines – that would be NHS England and the local commissionig body NHS Sussex. They too failed to act.
The people who failed to act betrayed our trust and failed the children they were responsible for and their families.
The question must be asked – why did the authorities not act on the reports they were receiving about WellBN? One possible answer is they too were caught up in the ideology of trans “healthcare” – a belief that there are children whose sense of alienation from their sexed bodies can only be remedied by powerful, dangerous and often irreversible medical interventions with drugs and hormones.
Or it was political – they were more afraid of being labelled “transphobic” than doing their actual jobs to protect children and young people from harm.
I believe that there needs to be accountability. There must be a public inquiry.
How else can we understand what went so badly wrong and how to prevent anything like this ever happening again?
Amongst its tasks should be to examine how this dangerous, unscientific and bizarre ideology took hold of the NHS and all bodies responsible for regulation and oversight and led them to ignore repeated warnings of harm to children.
Another task will be to ascertain how widespread this practice is – how many other GPs are prescribing hormones to children? WellBN may just be the tip of the iceberg. The investigation report hints at this by saying that ICBs should write to all GPs reminding them of their responsibilities. As Hannah Barnes’ article explained, data on prescriptions of hormones to young people is available to the NHS should it wish to investigate. The reasons for the prescriptions are not stated but as the other conditions for which hormones are prescribed to young people are very rare, it should be possible to identify other clusters of abnormal prescribing.
I’ll be talking about this and other issues related to GP hormone prescribing at the upcoming conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine 5/6 July. You can book ticket for the conference or livestream below.
Click here to book conference ticket
