Trust scales down cost claim from £180,000 to £24,000 in private case management meeting

In a surprise move this morning judge Mrs E J McLaren adjourned the £180,000 costs hearing brought by Epsom and St Helier University NHS Trust against whistleblower consultant cardiologist Dr Usha Prasad.

She took the decision before the hearing started and explained that one of the panellists who heard the original employment tribunal hearing under judge Tony Hyams-Parish was now unable to attend. This appears to have happened in the last 24 hours as the acting regional judge Omar Khalil had ordered the hearing to go ahead. No explanation was given why the panellist couldn’t suddenly attend.

The decision also comes as Dr Usha Prasad has repeatedly requested a postponement of the hearing because she is ill and couldn’t think straight because of mental stress and sent the tribunal a doctor’s note confirming this. This had been repeatedly ignored by lawyers Capsticks, who represent the trust, and the tribunal but the judge said yesterday that Dr Prasad’s health will be discussed in a private case management meeting convened immediately after the adjournment. At that meeting with the judge the trust caved in and reduced the costs claim from £180,000 to £24,000 and accepted it would have to wait some time for a fresh hearing.

The adjournment also comes at a time of national public outrage following the baby murder conviction of nurse Lucy Letby at the Countess of Chester Hospital when it was revealed that managers threatened to report consultants who raised the alarm to the General Medical Council and forced them to write a letter of apology to the murderer nurse.

The situation was worse for Dr Prasad at the Epsom trust as she was reported to the General Medical Council by the trust . A document listing 43 cases was sent to the GMC who investigated her and then exonerated her taking the unusual decision to revalidate her to practice without any further application from her. That having failed the trust held an internal inquiry branding her as ” unfit for purpose ” as a human being because they could no longer say she wasn’t an excellent doctor.

The man behind the continual pursuit of Dr Prasad is thought to be Dr James Marsh, the joint deputy chief executive and joint medical director of the St George’s, Epsom and St Helier hospital group, who gave evidence against her at the tribunal.

In a final act to put pressure on Dr Prasad before today’s tribunal Mrs Jessica Blackburn, the senior solicitor for lawyers, Capsticks representing the trust, sent her two new bundles of documents the previous night and Usha didn’t see it until only a few minutes before the tribunal was due to start. Given she knew she was mentally stressed and was a litigant in person with no lawyer to help her understand them, it looks to me like either a singularly callous act or she was rather late in finalising the trust’s case.

There is a wider issue here. As I have said before in 99.95 per cent of cases at employment tribunals, the employee does not pay the employer’s costs.

The picture that is now emerging is that the exception to this rule is the whistleblower. Usha’s case is not unique in this respect.

Cost threats have been made against Dr Chris Day, who has been involved in a ten year battle with the Health Education Executive and Greenwich and Lewisham NHS trust over patient deaths and safety at Woolwich Hospital intensive care unit; Dr Peter Duffy, a urologist at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, later vindicated over patient deaths; and outside the NHS, Alison McDermott, a management consultant, over bullying and harassment at Sellafield and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Two more whistleblowers have now come forward at Sellafield and are under threat.

This list is the tip of the iceberg – I know of a number of other doctors, belonging to the informal Justice for Doctors group, who haven’t made their cases public yet, who have also been threatened with huge costs.

It is almost as though NHS and public sector managers have devised a standard playbook to use against any whistleblower who dares bring up the issue of patient safety to frighten them from doing anything about it. This is an area which both the inquiry and MPs on the Commons health and social care committee must look into – for the sake of all hospital patients and the nuclear safety of our country. Management bullies who threaten caring doctors and nurses must be removed from their jobs. No whistleblower should suffer like Usha Prasad ever again.

Please donate to Westminster Confidential to allow me to investigate forensically any injustice.