Exclusive: Top executive who offered secret deal to cover up whistleblower case gets promotion to new national role in the NHS

Posted on March 23, 2025 by davidhencke

Daniel Elkeles, moving from CEO of the London Ambulance Trust to NHS Providers. He is the former chief executive of the Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust.

In May Daniel Elkeles will become the £240,000 a year chief executive of NHS Providers, a membership body that covers all hospital, mental health, ambulance and community trusts. His job as NHS Providers will be to “to deliver high-quality, patient-focused care by enabling them to learn from each other, acting as their public voice and helping shape the system in which they operate.”

He will also following the demise of NHS England be a key link between the trusts and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, and the PM Sir Keir Starmer, whom he met in his present role as CEO of the London Ambulance Service.

His brief as NHS Providers say is to “build effective relationships with key stakeholders in central government, with regulators and across healthcare; champion member interests and raise their profile positively in the media.”

His appointment was lauded in the trade magazine the Health Service Journal, while the chair of NHS Providers, Professor Sir Terence Stephenson, said:

“He will spearhead our new strategic vision and help members deliver improvements for patients, service users and the communities they serve during a period of immense change and challenge in the health service.

“We have been through a robust process to find the right individual to provide leadership and support for our members, to influence key decision makers, and inspire and lead our staff team, reflecting our values and our commitment to becoming an anti-racist organisation.”
The HSJ went further saying: “During his time at Epsom and St Helier, Mr Elkeles led on plans, and secured funding, to build a brand new £500m specialist emergency care hospital in Sutton.

He also oversaw a “significant improvement” in patient care, quality, finance and leadership, culminating in the organisation being rated as “good” by the CQC.

The CEO also led on initiatives to improve culture and morale, resulting in Epsom and St Helier having strong scores in the staff survey in measures about equality, diversity and inclusion, as well as staff health and wellbeing.”

What is missing from this plaudit is that the main hospital in that trust, St Helier, is falling down and in desperate straights with leaky roofs, brown water in the taps, and nothing is going to be done to replace it until 2036 under Labour’s current hospital building programme. Nor does Mr Elkeles appeared to have done anything much about it when he was chief executive.

But far worse this ” robust process” to select him as the best person for the job seems to have missed two rather key and worrying incidents in his career at St Helier. One led to prolonged employment tribunal hearings, the other reached the desk of Sir Robert Behrens, the former health service commissioner.

The employment tribunal case involved an extremely competent doctor who was dismissed after being branded as ” unfit for purpose” – a legal term that doesn’t exist for people -at a hearing organised by the trust. I am not naming her in this article but people may find part of the story familiar to readers of my blog.

What I am concentrating on is the role of the chief executive in dealing with her case.

Among the papers released for the tribunal were private emails between Mr Elkeles and her, which then became public documents.

In one Mr Elkeles offers a deal for her to leave the trust and escape what would amount to a disciplinary hearing if she drops any action against the trust.

He wrote: “We ensure MYT[ Mid Yorks NHS Trust] agree that you can go there and we jointly set up with them the required training and support
2) ESTH will pay your salary for a period of 6-12 months (to be agreed) whilst you are at MYT
3) At the end of the agreed 6-12 months period ESTH will no longer be your employer
4) ESTH agree to cease the MHPS process[ this was a hearing questioning her competence]which means we can find a way to ensure you are re-validated (not my area of expertise but i am sure there will be a
way)
5) You need to drop all the actions you are taking against ESTH.
If we can agree this then I would hope that everyone can move forward positively.”

When she refused to do this he wrote back: “I made a proposal on how to provide a constructive ending to this process on Friday. I did not expect to receive this type of reply from you which in my view does nothing to try and find a solution to this issue but just perpetuates the current impasse we seem to have reached. I therefore withdraw my offer and any input from me as CEO to resolve this informally. The hearing that is scheduled for Monday and Tuesday next week should continue as planned and reach whatever conclusion the panel believe is appropriate.”

What he was asking was that she withdrew any allegations against the trust of sexism and racism ( she was the sole woman at that level in that department and from an ethnic minority) and also hide a whistleblower claim about an avoidable death of a heart patient there which the trust admitted later in public they avoided reporting to the local coroner.

Her lawyer also produced statistics showing that despite the trust employing, like most London trusts, a very diverse range of people, it did not have a very good record in treating them.

As far as validation was concerned the General Medical Council revalidated her anyway – despite multiple claims of incompetence from the trust which were all dismissed by an independent medical expert asked to examine them.

The second case which involved the widow of a patient who died in agony at St Helier Hospital with nurses refusing to give him pain relief was covered on my blog. You can read the case here.

Robert Sheppard: Left to die in agony by St Helier Hospital

Her complaint to the Health Services Commissioner about his treatment led an apology from the chief executive but other matters by the management were brushed under the carpet. This included the fact that Robert Sheppard had picked up a bacterial infection called klebsiella which attacks people with a weak immune system and it was never notified by the hospital to the authorities, In fact his initial death certificate which would had to be provided by the hospital’s doctors airbrushed out that he had the infection.

Wendy , his widow, said:” Dying with dignity was something not given to Robert. I will never forgive St.Helier Hospital. It’s failures towards Robert were ‘swept under the carpet’ by the Hospital management. My complaints were misconstrued to make St.Helier look in a better light and incidents that happened weren’t recorded in Robert’s medical notes so I am told. “

All this raises questions about how Daniel Elkeles will do in his new job. Will he really speak truth to power or will he bury issues from public scrutiny to protect the reputation of the NHS trusts , who are his members? Will patient safety and equality and race issues be tackled with vigour or sacrificed to make sure his organisation gets a good press.

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How the St Georges, St Helier and Epsom Hospital Group fixed the dismissal of whistleblower cardiologist Dr Usha Prasad

Posted on January 22, 2024 by davidhencke

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 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, 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.”

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.