Trust wants to ban two expert anaesthetists from giving evidence for Dr Mark Day

An epic nine year struggle between junior doctor Chris Day and Lewisham and Greenwich NHS trust over patient safety at an intensive care unit and accident and emergency department comes to a head at 15 day employment tribunal on Monday.

The story began in August 2013 when Chris Day, a junior doctor initially complained about inadequate staffing. It got worse in January 2014 when he was working overnight in the intensive care unit at Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich when two locum doctors failed to show up. He had to cover other wards and A&E and reported his concerns to managers. He saw this as putting patients in such a sensitive area at serious risk.

extraordinary convoluted story

What followed is an extraordinary convoluted story of denial of the problem by the trust, misleading statements, poor investigations, threats of a huge legal bill which led him at one stage to settle the case only for it to be re-opened at a hearing before another High Court judge. There is a detailed blog by Dr Moosa Qureshi on CygnusReports.org which goes into forensic detail of the twists and turns of his case so I won’t repeat all the detail. I recommend you read his account. The costs of the protracted legal action to the NHS trust now amount to little short of £1million

A recent blog on my site looked at one aspect of the case, illustrating what appear to be underhand methods by a former dean at Health Education England to persuade Sir Norman Lamb, then a Liberal Democrat MP, not to pursue Dr Day’s case. Health Education England disowned his action at an employment tribunal and succeeded at being taken off as a party to Monday’s proceedings.

The issue will not go away next week as unusually Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, will give a statement to the tribunal, as a witness for Chris Day.

Sir Norman Lamb, also a former health minister, will appear as a witness for Dr Day at the hearing so people are likely to hear a lot more about what actually happened.

Two highly distinguished consultant anaesthetists were also scheduled to give evidence on behalf of Dr Day. They are Dr Sebastian Hormaeche and Dr Megan Smith .

The trust will try during the proceedings to ban them giving evidence.

The case is likely to look at the role of lawyers and also the role of M J Roddis, a clinical management consultancy in this case. They were employed by the trust to investigate this case and Dr Day claims they misrepresented his evidence, played down the problems, and omitted some damaging information about patient care.

The tribunal hearing will not be available on line as the court has decided in advance it will be an ” in person” hearing – even though three of the first five days will be held during a national rail strike.

Nor is it likely to be officially recorded. But Chris Day, who is represented by lawyers paid by the British Medical Association, has engaged a Ministry of Justice approved note taking service so there will be a full transcript of the proceedings.

I put some points to the trust and asked them for any comments they might wish to make but officials did not respond.

UPDATE: Since this post was published the employment tribunal has done a U-turn and decided to hold the hearing online which means it will be more accessible to the press and public It will not be held at Croydon, south London as there was not a judge available to preside over the 15 day hearing.

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