One aspect of the second recent cost hearing against whistleblower and human resources consultant Alison McDermott by Sellafield and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority which was not covered is the cost to the public and us the taxpayer.
During the hearing Deshpal Panesar, KC Sellafield’s lawyer from Old Square Chambers, rather pompously told the hearing that the fact Sellafield was claiming £20,000 off Alison was ” to protect the public purse”. He and the Nuclear Commissioning Authority which was also claiming £20,000 made a huge point that her “unreasonable behaviour” by pursing them at a tribunal meant she should pay a penalty.
What is now emerging from Freedom of Information requests is that the cost to bring this action far outweighs the money they will receive even if they are 100 per cent successful.
Both nuclear giants have already spent a huge sum – nearly £700,000 of taxpayer’s money – fighting Alison, whose consultancy was terminated, after her report revealed bullying and fear among staff at the nuclear site in Sellafield.
Alison McDermott
Now it is known from FOI that both organisations have spent £59,000 between them on preparing the case for the second hearing on top of money they had already spent for the first costs hearing. This doesn’t include the cost of hearing itself which is about another £20,000 considering Sellafield’s lawyers Deshpal Paneser. KC charges £5500 a day for the hearing and Emma Mills, from DLA Piper, who charges £3000 a day . The NDA employed another barrister, Rachel Levene and solicitors Pinsent Mason. Plus there were paralegals at the hearing.
Now one would think that after a High Court judge had ruled that the first costs decision was ” unsafe” and said his view should be taken into account by judge Stuart Robertson, who has heard the second hearing, there would be pause for thought. Both nuclear organisations are also lucky they will not face an appeal. So any sane organisation would decide to leave it there.
Instead we have the economic madness, which no commercial company conducting a risk assessment would follow, of throwing more money at bringing a second case when there is not the slightest chance of getting their money back. Indeed even if they were 100 per cent successful they stand to lose £40,000 and that is by no means certain they will get that. It is only that it is our money from the taxpayer they can throw it around like confetti.
So why are they doing it? The decision must have been endorsed by Euan Hutton, the new chief executive.
Despite previously serving as a Mental Health Champion alongside Ms. McDermott to foster a kinder and more supportive work environment, Mr. Hutton is now relentlessly pursuing costs against her.
In various YouTube videos, Mr. Hutton espouses the importance of treating people with kindness, yet his actions towards Ms. McDermott are anything but. He actually says that “kindness is putting in the time to think about how different people act differently, that’s what kindness is all about” [second video from 20 seconds onwards]. By hounding her for costs related to her whistleblowing for the second time, he has subjected her to immense stress and anguish, betraying the values he once claimed to champion.
Now Sellafield receives £6.7 million daily from taxpayers. Mr. Hutton’s decision to waste these funds on a vindictive legal battle against a whistleblower is an egregious misuse of public money. It is a slap in the face to taxpayers who trust Sellafield to use their contributions responsibly.
The Guardian has reported that the National Audit Office will investigate Sellafield’s substantial expenditure.
Mr. Hutton should be held accountable for his actions, which have caused harm to Ms. McDermott and undermined Sellafield’s commitment to employee wellbeing and to a culture of openness.
But perhaps this is the real reason for using public money in this way is to silence anybody else who might be thinking of exposing the dark secrets inside Sellafield. She is not the only whistleblower.
I approached Sellafield and the NDA about this waste of money but both said
“These issues are still subject to legal proceedings. We cannot comment further at this stage.”
As reported on this blog earlier this week, the confrontational, five-and-a-half-year whistleblowing litigation between equalities adviser Alison McDermott and Sellafield and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority last week featured a one-day costs hearing at Leeds Employment Tribunal, even though an earlier costs award against Ms McDermott had been ruled as unsafe by the appeal court in London. The aim of this article is to point to the public interest in matters at the heart of this case that have been treated lightly by the presiding Tribunal judges, and ignored by the two defending organizations (Respondents).
Alison McDermott
There have been strong, conflicting claims on both sides throughout the case, many of which related to the way in which litigation was conducted. These were the subject of last week’s hearing. The two Respondents were represented by KC Deshpal Panesar, for Sellafield, and Rachael Levene, for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, hired by the law firms DLA Piper and Pinsent Masons respectively.
Deshpal Panesar KC
In her address to the court, Ms McDermott reminded us of the public interest in her original report from 2018: the workplace culture at Sellafield. In her address, Ms McDermott reported that just 11% of people on the site strongly agreed that they could speak out without fear of reprisal. I have seen employee opinion surveys from the site. The scores for the prioritization of safety as an issue are significantly higher than the scores for ability to speak out, indicating a serious gap between formal policy and managerial practices. This matters especially on a nuclear site.
Mikhael Gorbachev. Pic credit:BBC
Nearly 40 years ago, following the accident at the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine, the then leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev recognized that a climate of fear both made such accidents more likely and delayed a proportionate response. He instigated a policy of glasnost – freedom to speak up – as a direct consequence. This intuitive conclusion by Mr Gorbachev has since been vindicated by numerous workplace studies, which show that workplaces with low engagement and higher levels of fear are statistically more prone to accidents (the Gallup survey cited in this report, for example. the link is Engaged Workplaces Are Safer for Employees (gallup.com)). When I was talking with a press officer from the Office for Nuclear Regulation three years ago, in relation to the Ms McDermott case, he was unaware of this link, and assumed workplace culture and safety issues to be separate categories.
Rachel Levene
Rachael Levene, barrister for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, appointed by Pinsent Masons, last week claimed that Ms McDermott was not a whistleblower, and not entitled to protection from detriment under Section 47(B) of the relevant legislation. This was a narrow legal argument, while members of the press and the public can observe that Ms McDermott’s central claim of a bullying and toxic culture and an HR leadership that was not on top of the issues, have been the conclusions separately made by several authoritative sources: A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, commissioned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, The BBC, in an investigation reported in March 2021 (as a declaration of interest, I referred this story to the BBC), Link:Sellafield nuclear site a ‘toxic mix of bullying and harassment’ – BBC News: The Guardian, in a report in December 2023, link Sellafield nuclear site workers claim ‘toxic culture’ of bullying, sexual harassment and drugs could put safety at risk | Energy industry | The Guardian The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s own representatives, speaking under oath at the main hearing on 29 June 2021, agreeing with the PwC report’s conclusions that the HR function was ‘not fit for purpose’’, praising Ms McDermott’s contribution and expressing surprise at her sudden departure, as reported on this blog at the time. Link: Nuclear industry leaders contradict each other in landmark whistleblowing case | Westminster Confidential (davidhencke.com)
This evidence was missing from the 2021 Tribunal ruling that found against Ms McDermott. There is no transcript available at an Employment Tribunal, which hampered her appeal. I attended that day and have short-hand notes. There is a significant public safety risk attended to last week’s hearing. Sellafield’s management were making a very public declaration that if someone dares criticize them, even if they have a strong case, sufficiently well founded to reach the appeal court which reached a balanced verdict, they risk having their professional reputation trashed and suffering the threat of a life-altering financial penalty (the Respondents have bid to claim a total of £40,000 from the Claimant). It is likely that those low levels of freedom to speak out will have fallen even further following last week’s hearing. The principal tactic of the Respondents has been to promote a pejorative narrative about the claimant, largely based on her response to their own legal tactics. For example, from Mr Panesar we heard him say that Ms McDermott had made a false complaint of fabricated evidence being used against her, in a claim that was then dropped on the eve of a hearing, and that this was unreasonable behaviour.
Sellafield letters unlawfully processed on personal computers – ICO
From Ms McDermott, we learned that the evidence in question consisted of three letters purporting to complain about her conduct while working at the Sellafield site. This evidence was not presented at the beginning of litigation. At the point of her dismissal, she was informed that the sole reason for termination of her contract was financial – an explanation also given to the governing body. After Ms McDermott discovered that some £17 million had been allocated to work of a similar nature, the Respondents switched to one of competence, admitting it had lied about the initial reason. The three letters only appeared one year later. The letters were produced on personal PCs, contrary to company policy. They were later found by the Information Commissioner’s Office to have been unlawfully processed, in contravention of data protection law (Judge Lancaster wrongly described the ICO ruling as mere criticism in the 2021 tribunal ruling.)
When restored, the metadata showed that the document had been open for three hours at the point of its creation, during which time phone records showed that the author took a long phone call from the HR director Heather Roberts, the third Respondent in the case. The focus by Sellafield’s lawyers last week on the style of whistleblowing or protests made by Ms McDermott, ignoring or downplaying their substance, is straight from the anti-whistleblower playbook. It has been used by several NHS trusts to discredit medical professionals raising safety concerns – several of whom were watching last week’s proceedings in Leeds, either in person or by remote link.
Quite how such tactics have come to be regarded as acceptable by Tribunal judges is a matter of concern, and is likely to come under scrutiny now that the NHS Whistleblowers’ Group, numbering some 1,600 individuals, has been invited to assist the Thirlwall Inquiry into the Lucy Letby case. Sellafield’s lawyers and press officers will point to the 2021 ruling which found in their favour – a judgement that got the ICO ruling wrong, ignored swathes of evidence and multiple failures of disclosure by the Respondents. There is a term in football: the ugly win. Sellafield et al won ugly. But this is not football, and the ugliness is a much bigger story than the win.
Alison McDermott, a human resources and diversity consultant, was back at a tribunal last week fighting a second attempt by Sellafield waste facility and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to demand costs after she brought a whistleblowing case against both of them.
The consultant was sacked by Sellafield after she compiled a report at their request which revealed bullying at the plant and since then has faced a tribunal and an appeal tribunal before this fresh action bought by both nuclear bodies. She lost the first tribunal heard by judge Lancaster who originally ordered she should pay the £40,000 costs. But an appeal judge Auerbach overturned the costs order as ” unsafe”,
This week both bodies decided to spend more taxpayers’ money and appeal the judge’s order to ditch the costs. If Sellafield succeeds it will recover just six per cent of the huge lawyers fees both bodies had paid to pursue her for years.
The hearing opened with a blistering attack on her by Sellafield’s lawyer, Deshpal Panesar KC, Of Old Square Chambers who is paid £5.500 a day, effectively said that everything Alison McDermott said , including her whistleblowing detriments was a ” baseless lie”.
He told the tribunal she had made “baseless claims of the most damaging sort, representing an existential threat to the careers of multiple public servants, based on multiple untruths”. Indeed so strong was his attack that a person who overhead part of the proceedings thought I had tuned into the Old Bailey and was hearing the denunciation of a convicted criminal.
Rachel Levene
Rachael Levene, representing the NDA, said Ms McDermott had “acted unreasonably” by involving the nuclear body in the case at all. She claimed that the body, which works closely with Sellafield, was not involved and Ms McDermott should have known that because of all the evidence it produced. Given that the body had failed to extradite itself from the tribunal in the first place, this seemed to me rather a chilling attitude to take as it suggests that claimants should be blamed if they bring a case at all.
The NDA then raised that it had offered £160,000 to settle the case – even though it was arguing at the same time it should not have been involved in the first place – but this had been rejected by her. Ms McDermott has said that she did not settle the case over the money but over a point of principle to raise the issue in a tribunal. She also said that judge Lancaster had refused herself and her husband’s request to contest the NDA’s version of what happened at the meeting when the offer was made.
Sellafield
Alison McDermott countered arguments by Deshpal Panesar by pointing out that the appeal judge had ruled that the costs had been ” unjustly awarded ” and questioned his assertion that she was not a whistleblower by pointing out that the appeal judge decided she was and that judge Lancaster’s tribunal had erred in its judgement on two disclosures.
She also pointed out that she had pressed repeatedly for mediation to solve the dispute but this had been rejected and also that both sides had decided to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on expensive lawyers when they had big human resources and legal departments, over 100 at Sellafield, which could have handled the case.
Moral obligation to scared staff at Sellafield- Alison McDermott
She told the judge :”I was brought in to do a job and I did my job. I felt a deep moral obligation to the people I was speaking to who were telling me how scared and stressed they were by the culture at Sellafield.”
She said she was told by Lesley Bowen, a senior HR Manager, at Sellafield that she was let go for financial reasons. Ms McDermott asked if there were any other reasons and Lesley Bowen confirmed in writing that it was purely down to financial constraints. But after Ms McDermott found out they had spent £17 million awarding HR contracts they changed their tune and said they had lied to her and that they were really letting her go due to performance concerns. Which is odd as they had just rehired her, according to Ms Bowen, due to her excellent past performance working across Sellafield and the NDA.
At an earlier tribunal she had felt she had been treated by Mr Panesar equally badly during cross examination
She told me:” I found he transgressed professional boundaries and went further and took no account that I was vulnerable to such criticism. “Over many days he accused me of being “motivated by spite,” “self-serving,” “self-absorbed, “wholly intent on chasing a windfall”, “seeking to ruin the reputations of HR staff at Sellafield” and even “acting out of revenge” .
She also disputed any idea by submitting a Freedom of Information request to obtain information that had been withheld by Sellafield and the NDA amounted to ” unreasonable behaviour.” These included information that both Sellafield and the NDA has spent £670,000 between them on lawyers and the NDA has just spent another £45,00 on prelimary legal work to recover £20,000 from her.
She pointed out that she and a witness on her behalf, another whistleblower at Sellafield, Karl Connor, had experienced ” unremitting stress” from the management at Sellafield.
She concluded: “The Tribunal is implored to recognise the substantial challenges the Claimant has faced in bringing this whistleblowing claim which has now been ongoing for 5.5 years. The Claimant asks the Tribunal to affirm whistleblowers’ vital role and prevent further harm or costs to the Claimant. The significance of not penalising whistleblowers is particularly acute in the context of Sellafield Ltd, a nuclear facility where the potential consequences of unchecked wrongdoing could be catastrophic.”
Judge Stuart Robertson reserved judgement which will announced later.
Dr Usha Prasad, the whistleblower cardiologist sacked by the Epsom and St Helier University Hospital Trust, was back at an employment tribunal yesterday to fight for a hearing that she had been unfairly dismissed.
The public hearing was delayed for nearly two hours because 400 pages of legal papers from the trust could not be immediately accessed to be read by the judge. So both sides spent three hours presenting oral evidence instead.
The successor trust, St George’s, Epsom and St Helier Hospital Group, is seeking to strike out her case saying a decision at a previous tribunal by Judge Hyams-Parish, which came down in favour of the trust over her claims of discrimination, victimisation, harassment and whistleblowing meant it should be the end of the matter.
Miss Rehana Azib, QC, for the trust argued that her dismissal was the consequence of the failure of her claims and there was no need for a further hearing.
To add to the confusion in the day Dr Prasad said a decision that the case should go ahead had already been taken in September 2022 – more than 18 months ago. . She said Judge Balogun had already rejected an attempt by the trust to strike out this further hearing and ordered that the case will be listed for a case management hearing for 2 hours and a separate full hearing listed for 3 days. “
She was told by the present judge that this ruling had been reconsidered by the judge. However it is extraordinary that Miss Azib excluded the letter saying the trust’s first strike out was unsuccessful from the trust’s bundle for the hearing. Dr Prasad had received no notice that this had been changed but yesterday’s hearing still went ahead.
Rehana Azib KC: Pic credit: Keble College, Oxford
Miss Azib, KC from 2, Temple Gardens Chambers, based nearly all her entire case against Dr Prasad on Judge Tony Hyams-Parish’s judgement. She also tried to extricate Jacqueline Totterdell, group chief executive of the trust, from the case brought by Dr Prasad by arguing she was not chief executive at the time at the time of her dismissal. She has however continued to authorise lawyers to pursue Dr Prasad. There followed an argument that her post represented the main body of the trust. Ms Azib told the judge that to bring a case against her personally rather than the trust would cause her stress and be time consuming from her other duties.
I covered the Hyams- Parish judgement at the time. My blog on his judgement is here.
Judge Christina Morton
The most dramatic part of the hearing came when Dr Prasad, challenged by Miss Azib’s statement that none of actions by the trust were judged by Hyams-Parish to have been connected to her whistleblowing claims, produced a stream of examples.
This included an attempt by Dr. James Marsh, now group deputy group chief executive, to water down her whistleblowing report on the ” avoidable death ” of heart patient, Mr P, which the trust confirmed at the Hyams-Parish hearing had never been reported by Richard Bogle, head of cardiology to the coroner or the Care Quality Commission. Her refusal to do seemed to lead to her internal disciplinary hearing..
She pointed out that there was no independent expert at the hearing to examine the case against her, all the people were colleagues of Dr Marsh and his wife in both NHS and private practice. A list of what turned out to be vexatious cases of her failures sent to the General Medical Council by the trust was compiled by Dr Marsh’s close colleague. They were thrown out by the GMC who exonerated and revalidated her to work anywhere in the UK. Judge Hyams-Parish did not want to see their report.
The most telling example was an email from the then chief executive of the trust Daniel Elkeles, offering to abandon the internal disciplinary proceedings against her if she dropped the tribunal case against the trust which contained the whistleblowing claim. He would help to revalidate her so long as she left the trust.
She also pointed out that she was banned from any clinical duty and told to stay in the office for 28 months before the disciplinary hearing and her dismissal. Since she saw 2,000 cardiology patients a year, this meant that the NHS – which was also hit by the pandemic- was depriving thousands of patients seeing a consultant whom the GMC had judged was perfectly competent to do her job.
As you will see in my contemporary blog on the Hyams-Parish judgement I noticed the judged ignored the plight of Patient P and the evidence of the letter from the chief executive to her at the time
She also accused lawyers for the trust of witholding information and misleading previous court hearings – particularly not revealing that when she could not attend a hearing the text of a doctor’s letter explaining why. The respondent’s lawyer also told the judge that Dr Prasad hadn’t submitted ” any particulars of her claIm” over this case yet she had submitted them to the respondent last April. She also didn’t tell the judge Usha’s detriment case had been listed for an appeal.
The accusations led Miss Azib to remind the judge that serious allegations had been raised in ” an open hearing.”
I got the impression that the lawyer and the judge would have much preferred this hearing to have been held without the public and the press being present. It is a good example of why there ought to be more coverage of what happens at employment tribunals.. The judge is reserving judgement.
Facts surrounding the case
The trust has engaged and paid 33 lawyers to pursue Dr Prasad over the last six years at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds to the taxpayer.
Nearly 10,000 NHS cardiology patients in South London and Surrey have been deprived of being treated by Dr Prasad while she was restricted from doing any clinical work.
Thousands of followers of this website may remember last year’s nine blog coverage I gave to the employment tribunal over the sacking of whistleblower Mr Martyn Pitman at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (HHFT). He lost the hearing. He was belittled and and repeatedly insulted by the former head of chambers, Mark Sutton of Old Square Chambers, including calling him a ‘freelance agitator,’ only to later be forced to retract that slur. Sutton, who picked up a big share of the £650,000 taxpayer funded legal fees pay out to represent the trust, approached the ET by portraying Mr Pitman as something of a tyrant, an assessment clearly not shared by his previous colleagues, who actually worked with him, attending in numbers at the hearing, or indeed by his thousands of social media supporters
Mr Pitman was sacked because it was said his employment there was ” a present danger to patient safety ” by the former chief medical officer of the trust, Lara Alloway. It was also claimed that his relationship with the Trust’s senior management had ‘irretrievably broken down”. Yet it was he who had raised patient safety issues which was stomped on by non-clinical senior midwifery managers, despite identical concerns also being raised a few months later by several senior clinical midwives.
Dr Lara Alloway now chief medical officer for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board
Well now a year on, following Mr Pitman’s dismissal, it is revealed that there is a ” present danger to patient safety ” in the maternity wards at the trust – a more than five fold increase in the number of babies delivered there with labour-related hypoxic brain injury (Hypoxic Ischaemic Encephalopathy: HIE) many of which may have been preventable. According to the Trust’s latest on-line patient information approximately 5,700 babies are delivered across its 3 sites.
The trust had an extremely low rate of HIE until now
In the final year of Mr Pitman’s Consultant tenure at HHFT, prior to his formal dismissal, the HIE rate across the Trust was reported as 0.5 per 1000 deliveries – equivalent to less than 3 babies per annum. In 2023, the year following his dismissal, the rate increased, in a previously unprecedented fashion, to 2.5 per 1000 deliveries, equivalent to 14 babies per annum.
Of course the trust dispute this – even though it was published in a very thorough article by Sirin Kale for Guardian Society. The full article is well worth a read and you can link to it here.
The trust communications department described the article as misleading. A statement said:
“There are instances in Ms Kale’s reporting where we believe her reflection of the facts is misleading. This interpretation of the data fails to provide the reader with the wider context required to understand it. It therefore runs the risk of unreasonably undermining public confidence in a service which is safe and performing well. To avoid misleading the public we would strongly suggest that your article must explain that the rate of HIE in live births with Hampshire Hospitals is well within the normal limits.”
I might have believed them but for an internal power point presentation at a clinician led Neonatal Morbidity and Mortality meeting held at the trust in February. Reproduced below it says precisely the opposite to what the communications department is claiming – that cases of HIE are ” significantly worse than the network average”. It also proposes tough action to combat it. If people are to believe there is no problem and everything is safe – such action speaks volumes.
This particular issue at the trust was one of the problems raised by Mr Pitman in 2019 when he made his whistleblowing complaint in early 2019.
He told me:” I had a specialist interest in fetal monitoring, CTG interpretation and labour management optimisation. Throughout my period of tenure I was responsible for cross-site staff teaching of fetal /CTG monitoring and had developed a regional reputation for my expertise in this area. For several consecutive years I had been praised for playing a significant role at RHCH in minimising the HIE rates down to commendably low levels well below the network and indeed national average for 2 consecutive years. For instance, we achieved the enviable statistic of not having a single poor maternity outcome attributed to CTG misinterpretation. This dramatic deterioration, in a critical maternity outcome metric, that I was passionate about and had successfully devoted my focus and clinical attention to, to have occurred within the 12 months since my dismissal will certainly not have escaped the attention of either the senior midwifery managers or the Trust’s senior management.”
Indeed significant events back in 2019, that led to Mr Pitman’s formal investigation and eventual dismissal included a a dispute between him and the midwifery managers about the dangers of sub-optimal fetal monitoring, including the potential pitfalls of assessing the baby’s heart rate using hand-held dopplers (intermittent auscultation) and confusing the baby’s heart rate with that of the mother.
He told me:” I was concerned that deteriorations in the standard of fetal monitoring and, particularly midwifery complacency in this regard in what were thought to be low-risk mothers was a developing concern and that if it was not addressed would lead to worse outcomes and, potentially increased baby injury (HIE) and death rates. This warning was completely and utterly ignored by the senior midwifery management. ” Such concerns have been highlighted repeatedly in other units across the UK, including the recent reviews undertaken by Donna Ockenden”.
What he predicted and was striving to prevent, by making practice recommendations, in the April 2019 Fetal Monitoring Guideline meeting has now happened. Instead of supporting him moves were made to silence him and to get him out of the way.
He said: “The very evening after this, unusually confrontational and adversarial, guideline meeting was when I was first ‘invited’ to a meeting which eventually developed into my formal disciplinary investigation. The senior midwifery managers had decided that my attempts to prevent their dangerous normalisation agenda had to be stopped
Two terrible baby births at Winchester hospital
Worse then happened, within just a week of this fateful meeting. As well as the tragic case raised in Sirin Kale’s article distressing case, where a baby was deprived of oxygen throughout labour and delivery . This second baby was delivered within just hours of the case featured in Sirin Kale’s Guardian article. Mr Pitman was the Consultant on-call in the Winchester Maternity Unit when both these tragic cases were delivered but, as they were midwifery-led, as they were believed to be ‘low-risk,’ neither he nor the Obstetric team had been directly involved in their care, until the ‘crash-calls’ were put out.
He said: a ” supposedly entirely low-risk healthy baby, maintained under solely midwifery-led care, was born moribundly unwell from HIE and needed to be urgently transferred to Southampton Hospital for brain cooling. The Head of midwifery, my principal complainant, who had been in the guideline meeting would have come into work the following Monday, been informed of these 2 cases, that there were huge issue with the intrapartum monitoring of them both, realised that this put her in a challenged position and given my concerns and the practice changes that I had been recommending just the previous week. This appears to have prompted her to escalate her concerns about me into a formal complaint, rather than an issue that could and should have been addressed by mediation. The timeline of events, at this time, was very telling”
So where does leave the maternity services at Winchester and Basingstoke hospitals? The trust has been on a public relations drive inviting the local BBC TV station, BBC South, into the maternity wards BEFORE it published these worrying figures on babies delivered with HIE. This was arranged and was broadcast less than a month before the concerning increased HIE rates were presented.
Here’s a video of the report:
BBC South Today broadcast on maternity services at Hampshire Hospitals NHS trust on 4th January this year chief executive Alex Whitfield tells viewers it is safe
Since then the trust has promised an internal , rather than , perhaps far more appropriate, independent external inquiry – rather the same philosophy as the Post Office used to say their Horizon computer project was sound when sub postmasters were being jailed for false accounting.
The most tragic outcome is that there are potentially parents in Hampshire who face a lifetime of worry worry and expense caring for children, who may have suffered avoidable labour-related hypoxic brain injuries. One also has to wonder what the level of medical negligence claims associated with these cases could, potentially, extend to? This could have been prevented if the trust was doing its job. Given the state of social care in this country this is a very serious state of affairs. You cannot say the trust were not warned by Dr Pitman. The then interim chief medical officer was Dr Nick Ward, a consultant paediatrician whose expertise is in paediatric nephrology.
So does the top management carry some blame? I put it to the communications department that Alex Whitfield, Lara Alloway ( now CMO at Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board), the midwifery management team, and Steve Erskine, chair of the trust board did. I got no comment on this but given what appears to be their complacent attitude to what is happening there I really wonder whether they do care about anything except the trust’s reputation.
On May 2nd one of the foremost experts on inquiries into maternity care Mr Bill Kirkup, has been invited to give a lecture at the trust. He has investigated baby deaths in the Morecambe Bay Trust and in the East Kent Trust. I wonder what my former colleague on the Gosport War Memorial Hospital independent panel will have to say about the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
They act as ” judge, jury and executioner” when whistleblowers raise patient safety issues
By David Ward, a former consultant cardiologist at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, London
All staff working in the healthcare professions should be regulated for very obvious reasons. Most of them are but NHS Trust managers (non-medical) are not. Why? Given that managers have enormous and disproportionate powers to initiate investigation, (enlisting private investigators is not unknown) restrict activities, refer to disciplinary hearings and regulatory bodies such as the GMC [ General Medical Council ] and the CQC, [Care Quality Commission] suspend and dismiss healthcare staff – most notably well-meaning, hardworking doctors for raising concerns about patient safety – shouldn’t managers should be regulated just like other NHS workers?
Doctors are obliged to raise concerns if they see problems which may affect patient safety (Duty of Candour, Reg 20 HSC Act 2008 and 2014) pejoratively called “whistleblowing”. It is a matter of patient safety. We know that the reactions by Trust managements to doctors raising concerns can destroy careers and family lives. Suicides of staff under persecution are not unknown. A few courageous people may resort to the corrupt Employment Tribunal process after dismissal. Trusts spend £millions (yes, really!) to defend their untenable self-appointed positions as “judge, jury and executioner”. Where does this money come from? You and me, the taxpayer. Does the victim (whistleblower) have equal access to such resources? Of course not! In fact, they are often sent the bill (aka a cost threat, a merciless device not worthy of a civilised society and in this context used to force the claimant to concede the case) for the huge legal expenses of the Trust’s lawyers. (I’ve seen a well-known law firms’ cost sheet, it’s mind-blowing).
Who initiates the actions that can result in these disastrous consequences? Yes, the Trust managers; sorry, but it’s true. (OK, sometimes medical managers are complicit as we have seen in recent dismissals – shame on them). This process must be taken away from management and regulation could incorporate this. As many recent cases illustrate, PIDA (1998) forces a Trust to deny that “whistleblowing” had any part of a dismissal despite the prior narrative being clearly laden with raising patient safety concerns. It urgently requires updating.
No winners in this egregious process
There are no winners during these egregious processes. Trusts are deprived of money that would be better spent on care. Doctors and nurses who have families to support but may be left without employment even in times of severe need such as the recent pandemic, their careers and family lives in ruins. Mental problems are not uncommon, why wouldn’t they be? Doctors who are required to cover for suspended and dismissed colleagues have to put in more hours. Dismissed doctors often find it difficult to get work in other Trusts. I know of cases where the management at the index Trust interferes with (including preventing) the appointment of a whistleblowing doctor elsewhere.
Managers (and their acolytes) should be banned from acting as “judge, jury and executioner”*. That’s not in keeping with open and fair justice, is it? (Human Rights Act,1998, Article 6). Stop disciplinaries just initiate prompt investigation (thereby reducing risk of further harms) of the concerns, analogous to the inquisitorial French system of discovering the facts – not the damaging adversarial approach prevalent at present in these situations.
Stop trusts wasting £millions on law firms
No wasting £millions on law firms and costly (very costly) barristers, no claimants (victims) forced to sell the family house, move abroad, give up the profession, no months of waiting for court hearings (often many, recurring over years – I know of at least 2 cases of dismissed doctors whose cases in the Employment Tribunal system have dragged on for a decade or more), less mental illness.
Pastoral care for staff who raise concerns? That would be a constructive, cost effective and beneficial alternative approach, wouldn’t it?
Just one last thing: in any given Trust does anyone remember the patient safety concerns that triggered all the iniquitous nonsensical sequence of particular events, what they were about and whether steps have been taken to rectify the deficiencies which led to the concerns in the first place (which may have included avoidable deaths)? Have they been documented other than by the person who initially raised the concerns? Were they formally registered? I doubt it. They are usually buried in a fog of emails and shrouded by a cloud of managerial vengeance directed toward the whistleblower. Perhaps some of the simple and inexpensive ideas mentioned here could be explored.
Does anyone really think that NHS managers should be exempt from regulation?
There is of course one simple solution: ban the suspension and dismissal by Trusts of medical staff who raise patient safety concerns in good faith. They are doing society a favour. *The Political State of Great Britain, for October 1717, Vol.XIV:398]
UPDATE: In a further twist in this long saga, High Court judge Dame Jennifer Eady, President of the Employment Appeal Tribunalinitially took a decisionnot to read Dr Day’s lettercomplaining about the injustices in the procedure of his tribunal case against Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Health Trust . Now it has been decided that another judge will rule whether she should read the letter. Such a move has been opposed by the trust, who are represented by Old Square Chambers.
Superficially the ruling by Deputy High Court judge Andrew Burns looked like a victory for the long campaigning whistleblower Dr Chris Day to get a fair hearing at his forthcoming Employment Appeal Tribunal. He was granted an appeal on six of the ten grounds presented to the hearing and he was publicly commended by the judge for restoring the employment rights of 54,000 doctors which had been taken away in a sleight of hand by the now merged Health Education England.
But a closer look at the judgement gives a rather different picture. Instead of allowing a full appeal of employment judge Ann Martin’s flawed hearing he introduced caveats and blocked the re-examining of crucial issues. These include examining whether MPs and the press have been misled by the NHS and their lawyers, whether deliberate concealment has occurred and such startling behaviour as a Lewisham and Greenwich health trust communications director destroying mid hearing 90,000 emails that could have helped Dr Day’s defence and subsequently declining to appear as a witness.. It also allowed the health trust’s lawyers to to traduce Dr Day’s public reputation and misrepresent his motives without fear of being dragged before the libel courts or even being properly cross examined about this at the tribunal.
In short Andrew Burns judgement is a ruling equivalent to the infamous “three wise monkeys” carving at a Japanese shrine. He ” sees no evil, he hears no evil and speaks no evil” at that flawed tribunal. And he has been given by Dr Day a chance to review his findings to take account of these omissions.
To put it simply he is blind to Ann Martin’s mishandling of that tribunal, he is deaf to Dr Day’s arguments to put this right, and he is silent about the outrageous behaviour of the trust’s employees and their lawyers, particularly Ben Cooper, KC on traducing Dr Day’s reputation and it being broadcast to MPs, the public and other trusts.
As Dr Day puts in an email accompanying his crowd justice website ” which goes into all the legal details “The Judge has allowed me to have an appeal but taken all my weapons and has blocked key issues being explored.”
Ben Cooper KC
The language used against Dr Day by Old Square chambers lawyer Ben Cooper would be defamatory outside a court room. He is described as ” having an obsessive belief in his victimhood”, accused of an “elaborate rewriting of history by him to fit in with his narrative” and condemned his evidence as ” dishonest and underhand.”
When pressed on this by Dr Day’s barrister Andrew Allen KC at the June 2022 Mr Cooper conceded he had no example of what he meant from Dr Day’s witness statement and Mr Allen was then prevented from cross examining Mr Cooper on Dr Day’s supplementary statement rebutting Mr Cooper’s insults and allegations.
To make matters worse Ben Cooper’s attack on Dr Day’s character has been picked up by a lawyer defending lawyers Hill Dickinson against Dr Day in another case. Dijen Basu, KC from Sergeants Inn Chambers, in a skeleton argument in a case still to be heard said of Dr Day ” The diagnosis of whistleblowitis is a pithy way of describing a man who had developed an obsessive belief in his own victimhood to the point of being prepared to dishonest and underhand in pursuit of what he saw as the virtue of his cause as Mr Cooper described him.”
The irony of this attack is the case revolves around Hill Dickinson depriving 54,000 junior doctors of their whistleblowing rights whilst not revealing key commissioning contracts in disclosure the firm were paid to draft. Now who was really being dishonest and underhand!
As Dr Day purchased the transcript of Ann Martin’s tribunal he has been able to point out that cross examination of Ben Cooper’s claims was halted by the judge but she went on to allude to Ben Cooper’s argument against Dr Day in her public judgement. Dr Day argued that this a breach of court procedure but the judge did not agree.
Judge Andrew Burns did agree he had made a mistake in describing Dr Day’s withdrawal in a previous hearing in this long dispute as being caused by duress rather than misrepresentation.. This was when his lawyer Chris Milson, without his instructions, tried to negotiate a settlement which included a confidentiality clause. Dr Day was able to get Judge Burns to accept that his case was not one of duress but one of serious allegations of misrepresentation from a number of lawyers whose accounts of the infamous settlement of the Day Case in 2018 do not add up.
Dr Day has now written to Judge Dame Jennifer Eady, President of the Employment Appeal Tribunals, asking her to intervene.
He writes: “It may come as no surprise that I and large numbers of doctors feel deeply let down by the way the EAT has handled my case over the last 10 years. I believe its decisions have not been logical and have ignored evidence, pleadings and important appeal points. I believe the most likely explanation for this is the EAT’s failure to manage properly the conflicts of interests and human factors that have come into play when Judges have dealt with certain issues in my case affecting their legal colleagues.”
He goes on: “The destruction, concealment and ignoring of large amounts of evidence at the June 2022 ET hearing of my case and the obstruction of 2 of our proposed cross examinations was widely reported and shocked people. Many were expecting these obvious issues to be dealt with decisively by the appeal tribunal. Instead, I have had to get into an argument with the EAT about whether such extraordinary conduct is enough for me to advance procedural unfairness as a ground of appeal”
He adds: “I am seriously considering whether I can proceed with an appeal in this court whilst the EAT refuses to answer” these points.
A check on social media of Judge Burns X account by 54,000 doctors, a group who campaign for the whistleblowing rights of junior doctors reveals how closely 3 of the lawyers involved on both sides of the Day settlement are connected socially.
Judge Andrew Burns, a former lawyer at Devereux follows and is followed by Chris Milsom – Dr Day’s lawyer in a previous 2018 case that settled ; he follows Old Square Chambers, which has a leading role in pursuing whistleblowers; Martin Hamilton, managing partner, Capsticks who Dr Day alleges misled MPs and the Board of Lewisham and Greenwich about his case and settlement. Other followers include Nadia Motraghi, KC, another Old Square Chambers that was against Dr Day, who also pursued Dr Usha Prasad, a whistleblower cardiologist at Georges and Epsom St Helier NHS trust.
Dame Jennifer Eady
Finally it turns out that judge Dame Jennifer Eady – whom Dr Day is relying on to adjudicate about this – is a former lawyer at Old Square Chambers from 1990 to 2013. During her time at Old Square Chambers, for 13 years from 2000, Ben Cooper KC, and from 2004 Nadia Motraghi were colleagues. It would be amazing if they don’t know each other very well as they practised in the same field.
So how will Dr Day get a fair hearing when three of the lawyers he is accusing of misleading on the settlement are so closely linked to the judge and the final arbiter is their former colleague now in an all powerful position to control the entire employment appeal tribunal system.
My final point from covering a number of whistleblower tribunals is that I am disgusted at the way very senior professional lawyers seem to enjoy denigrating, insulting, and belittling the careers of eminent doctors whose main concerns are to protect the public from bad medical practices which endanger lives.
Whistleblower Dr Chris Day won the right to appeal today when a a Deputy High Court Judge Andrew Burns of the Employment Appeal Tribunal granted permission to appeal the November 2022 decision of the London South Employment Tribunal on six out of ten grounds at a hearing in London.
The saga which has now being going on for almost ten years began when Dr Day raised patient safety issues in intensive care unit at Woolwich Hospital in London. The Judge said today this was of the “utmost seriousness” and were linked to two avoidable deaths but their status as reasonable beliefs were contested by the NHS for 4 years using public money.
Deputy High Court judge Andrew Burns
In a series of twists and turns at various tribunals investigating his claims Dr Day has been vilified by the trust not only in court but in a press release sent out by the trust and correspondence with four neighbouring trust chief executives and the head of NHS England, Dr Amanda Pritchard and local MPs.
This specific hearing followed a judgement in favour of the trust by employment judge Anne Martin at a hearing which revealed that David Cocke, a director of communications at the trust, who was due to be a witness but never turned up, destroyed 90,000 emails overnight during the hearing. A huge amount of evidence and correspondence that should have been released to Dr Day was suddenly discovered. The new evidence showed that the trust’s chief executive, Ben Travis, had misled the tribunal when he said that a board meeting which discussed Dr Day’s case did not exist and that he had not informed any other chief executive about the case other than the documents that were eventually disclosed to the court..
The hearing went on for an extra week because of all these disclosures and the British Medical Association, who are representing Dr Day, asked for their costs to be repaid yesterday because of the additional expense at the hearing. The judge agreed that a separate appeal to recover the BMA costs should also be granted permission to be heard.
Instead of a decision to allow an appeal this hearing was held today to decide whether there was an ” arguable case ” for an appeal.
Dr Chris Day won the right to appeal that some of the findings of the judgement were perverse, that the judgement failed to draw any inferences from the destruction of 90,000 emails and the failure to provide documents that would have helped Dr Day’s case. This in particular followed the disclosure in documents that under oath the chief executive, Ben Travis gave an untrue account about a board meeting and had hidden he had contacted other trust chief executives about Dr Day.
The judge seemed exercised that the trust despite the Care Quality Commission expressing concern about a press release which attacked Dr Day decided to do nothing about it and the judgement appeared to ignore this.
Andrew Allen KC
The judge also allowed the right of appeal for Dr Day about the way he had been treated as an employee and how events had unfolded at the trust.
What was not allowed was the right of Andrew Allen, the BMA’s funded lawyer, to cross examine the trust’s lawyer, Ben Cooper, about remarks he had made about Dr Day during the hearing. some of which he was forced to concede were not accurate. Mr Cooper was rescued By Judge Anne Martin from having to respond to Dr Day’s supplementary statement on this point and was further rescued by the EAT today. Coincidently today Mr Cooper was representing the retail giant Asda in a case next door to today’s hearing.
The Judge also blocked a ground of appeal relating to factual findings being made on whether MPs and the Press has been misled on Dr Day’s protected disclosures. Also blocked was Dr Day’s and his legal team’s clear request for a formal finding on whether deliberate concealment had occurred as part of Dr Day’s protected disclosures. It was made clear to the Judge these points were what the case was about.
Ben Cooper QC
Despite this the decision of a senior judge does call into question the judgement made by Anne Martin who it is now arguable made some poor calls -particularly avoiding the issue of the destruction of emails and withholding documents that should have been disclosed to Dr Day’s lawyers.
The judge also paid Dr Day a compliment saying by raising the dangers for patient safety caused by staff shortages in 2014 he was ” way ahead of his time.” This might suggest that judiciary is becoming increasingly aware about the state of the NHS and its effect on patient safety. Perhaps judges are seeing too many scandals reported in NHS trusts.
A former senior nurse at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich has come forward with a fresh tale of the toxic management at the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust and their treatment of whistleblowers in the wake of the tribunal verdict involving staff nurse Francisca Holmes. Francisca lost her case against the trust management over her treatment but the judge ruled she had genuine whistleblowing concerns when she was told of a patient found dead in Ward 22.
This is the same health trust still involved in a ten year battle with Dr Chris Day, a junior doctor, who in 2014 brought a still on going case on two ” avoidable deaths” in their intensive care unit. It is the same trust where a senior communications director deliberately destroyed 90,000 emails that could have been used in Dr Day’s defence during a tribunal hearing and escaped censure from the presiding judge.
Thurdy Campbell, a black senior nurse of Jamaican nationality, had worked for 22 years at the hospital as a senior sister in their accident and emergency department and manager of combined wards 22 and 23. She was dismissed on 17 May 2022.
Her grievance letter claims: “I was subjected to the following: work place mobbing, severe episodes of harassment and discriminative treatments, miscarriage of justice , coercive control, defamation of character, endangered working environment , abuse of power of position for personal gain and recrimination after making a series of protected acts and qualifying disclosures to NMC [Nursing and Midwifery Council]25 May 2021.
Senior party members from the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust Kelly Lewis-Towler, director of operations for acute and emergency medicine; Meera Nair ,director of people and board member, Victoria Tyler ,head of employee relations; HR Team and Investigation Managers colluded in wrongdoing by protecting the perpetrators and subjected me to series of detriments.”
Some of the managers she accuses appear in the same case as Francisca Holmes such as line manager Rodney Katandika and Ann Marie Coiley, the director of nursing.
Rodney Katandika
Matters came to a head when she was manager of the new combined Ward 22 and 23 – the ward where Francisca Holmes was told that an elderly patient was found dead. She raised the issue of patient safety but had no serious response. Six months after this incident Thurdy sent a further email saying “Clinical concerns relating to issues affecting patient’s safety, staffing, staff well-being and the working environment of Ward 22” escalating this to senior line management. Straight after this the trust launched a disciplinary hearing against her leading eventually to her dismissal the following May.
Kelly LewisTowler director of operations for acute and emergency medicine
She was certainly a thorn in the side of senior management. An internal email from Kelly Lewis-Towler to other senior managers, sent on 28 July 2021 accuses her of intimidation and claims senior staff were ill with workplace stress, declining to return from holidays, and claiming she cannot adequately support them and is facing ” a mass exit of staff”. All because she raised patient safety issues. She turns this on its head by saying patient safety is at risk because of the behaviour of Thurdy.
It is no wonder that during Francisca Holmes’ tribunal the trust did not produce her as a witness, even though she was well placed to comment on the situation since she was ward manager where the patient death happened because it would have revealed her warning of patient safety and provided evidence to the judge of bullying of Francisca by other senior staff.
Capsticks role in the trust
Thurdy’s grievance letter also exposes another worrying feature. Not only does Capsticks have a role as the trust’s lawyer to refute Thurdy’s claims at the employment tribunal but they have a major investigating role inside the trust for handling claims and disputes. So the firm has advance notice of any trouble coming managment’s way from staff and can intervene to help refute it and be in poll position should the person takes the trust to a tribunal. The firm are basically judge and jury in whistleblowing cases at Greenwich and Lewisham NHS trust.
Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich
Worse than that the grievance letter reveals that Capsticks attempted to force Thurdy to sign a non disclosure agreement – not as part of a normal procedure to get a settlement – but while the firm were involved in the internal investigation. Fortunately she resisted or otherwise you would be banned from reading about this case.
Thurdy lost the first round of employment tribunal cases and is awaiting the result of an appeal.
Her dismissal also nearly led to her being evicted from her home. She now has got a new job at less pay than in the NHS but in a much better enviornment.
My final point is that given the current state of the NHS it can ill afford to lose experienced nurses and doctors by maligning them in whistleblowing cases – like Thurdy and Francisca – and Martyn Pitman, the popular and competent obstetrician in Hampshire and Dr David Drew at Morecambe Bay. That’s why the treatment of whistleblowers needs urgent reform.
After my blog on the double standards of the Epsom and St Helier University Hospital Trust over its treatment of whistleblowers which included references to Dr Usha Prasad, I received an email from the communications team of the hospital group.
According to the team I had got everything wrong. The whistleblowing case had absolutely nothing to do with her dismissal. They said: ” It is not correct to say Ms Usha Prasad was dismissed for raising patient safety concerns. A disciplinary panel concluded that she should be dismissed for competency grounds, concerns around her practice/conduct and because relationships with key colleagues had broken down. This decision was upheld on appeal.”
Technically they are correct. But if you delve deeper it shows that this disciplinary panel was a completely flawed process – ignoring vital information and chaired by a person whose integrity had already been called into question and falls into a management playbook used by other trusts to get rid of troublesome doctors who raise unwelcome concerns about patient safety.
Even the conclusion of this disciplinary panel used a fake term. The chair concluded that she was ” unfit for purpose”. There is no such term in English employment law – a system can be ” unfit for purpose” but an individual cannot. And this has been raised at the highest level in NHS England by colleagues of her when they met Professor Stephen Powis, the national medical director, who could not explain such a term applying to an individual doctor.
Then there is the issue of competency. The big flaw in this is that after she raised her protected disclosure on patient safety the trust sent 43 complaints about her practice to the General Medical Council .These were organised by Dr James Marsh, then medical director of the Epsom and St Helier University Trust now Deputy Group Chief Executive Officer of the St George’s Group.
Dr James Marsh
Dr Marsh chose close colleague Dr Peter Andrews, a fellow renal physician who worked on the same ward, to investigate the claims, and Dr Ian Beeton, a cardiologist in private practice at nearby St Peter’s Hospital as an “independent” expert. Dr Beeton works with Dr Marsh’s wife, a radiologist at the same hospital. They asked Dr Richard Bogle, the head of the cardiology at the Epsom and St Helier Trust, to file the complaints who also works closely with private cardiologist Dr David Fluck at St Peter’s Hospital.
When it came to the disciplinary hearing the trust brought in Dr David Fluck to sit on the tribunal to judge Dr Usha Prasad. He also worked on joint projects with Dr Marsh.
I leave you to judge whether this was a genuinely independent investigation without any conflict of interest. But when the complaint went to the General Medical Council and was seen by a genuine independent cardiologist in Teesside and formerly at the world famous Papworth Hospital every complaint was thrown out. In fact I am told the GMC looked at the eight most serious complaints and decided there was nothing to see. And not only was it thrown out by the GMC , it decided to validate Dr Prasad as competent to work in any hospital in the UK for the next five years.
This GMC ruling was brushed aside by the disciplinary hearing and ignored by the judge when it came to an employment tribunal hearing later. The only clue came at the tribunal hearing when Dr James Marsh claimed that the trust had higher standards than the GMC. Frankly this was insulting to both the GMC and the eminent cardiologist who thought differently.
The second charge against her is that she couldn’t work with colleagues. Certainly relations with Dr James Marsh did deteriorate over her decision to say an elderly patient who died because the trust did not act on a serious heart condition was an ” avoidable death” and should have been notified to the coroner and the Care Quality Commission. Dr Marsh wanted this conclusion struck out and she refused to do it.
But if this is correct this would apply elsewhere and it doesn’t. Her work at Pinderfields Hospital in Yorkshire and at St George’s is praised by the hospitals and there have been no complaints about her relations with colleagues.
Dr David Ward
Dr David Ward, a close colleague of hers at St George’s, said this: ” I am pleased to say that I worked alongside Dr Usha Prasad when she was a visiting Consultant Cardiologist at St George’s Hospital (now part of the united Trust with Georges-Epsom- St-Helier or GESH). I found her to be collegiate, knowledgeable in general cardiology, skilled in her specialised areas (echo, heart failure etc). She was well-liked by all staff with whom she worked (catheter lab, echo). I (or anyone in the cardiology department at St George’s) never had any concerns about Dr Prasad’s clinical skills or competence and I find it most surprising that St Helier have retrospectively (for that it what it amounts to) found reason to question her abilities, coincidentally or not, after she had raised concerns about patient safety. I suspect this, also known as whistleblowing, is the underlying motive for the profoundly vengeful and unjustified response by the Trust.”
Claire McLaughlan
Finally there is the question of the disciplinary hearing itself. It was chaired by Claire McLaughlan – a profile of her is here – who ran into trouble with a judge at a hearing with cardiologist Dr Mattu, who won his case, for omitting evidence and over an interview for Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Health Trust with whistleblower Dr Chris Day, whose case is still continuing. He found the record of the interview with him had been altered, missing key points. As he had a secret recording of it, she had no alternative but to apologise and change back the record.
One final point. Dr Usha Prasad told me the former CEO of the Epsom and St Helier Trust, Daniel Elkeles ( now chief executive of the London Ambulance Trust) was prepared to “stop” the disciplinary hearing if I was prepared to drop “all you have against the trust; an ET case of whistleblowing detriment and harassment, discrimination”. One wonders how many back door deals take place over patient safety.
Westminster Confidential 