Gammon Awotona

December 2002

NHS whistleblowing continues

Alison Gammon, the doctor in charge of Stoke Mandeville Hospital's Accident and Emergency department, became ill after receiving threatening phone calls and letters because she raised concerns about the competence of a medical colleague going back to the late 1990s. In January 2002 an employment tribunal concluded that Gammon had been treated badly by management, and had not conducted a proper inquiry. Gammon refused compensation, saying: “All I wanted was a fair hearing”.

While civil servants were sent by the government to investigate the hospital’s long waiting lists, the management went on employing the unsafe doctor, despite complaints from many staff. Because of the management’s inability to behave in an open and accountable fashion, the reputation of the hospital now lies in ruins.

Conscientious professional, Alison Gammon, has said there are important lessons for the NHS: 'Until we can develop a truly non-punitive culture, in which people can have the confidence to raise their concerns, there will continue to be a failure properly to identify, manage and resolve clinical risk.' (See ‘The Observer’, 27-01-02).

In May 2002 it was reported that another NHS whistleblowing doctor had won a dismissal case. Dr Feyi Awotona, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology, was dismissed when she raised concerns about the high infant death rate and poor treatment of female patients at South Tyneside Hospital. The tribunal said her dismissal was "irredeemably tainted by unlawful victimisation". Instead of investigating Dr Awotona's public-spirited concerns, hospital managers set up a "kangaroo court" in order to oust her from her post as head of the hospital's labour ward.

Dr Awotona refused an offer of £85,000 to drop her case, because she was determined to protect her freedom of speech on behalf of the public. (See ‘The Guardian’, May 14, 2002)

Irene Mounsey, a medical secretary who raised concerns about standards in a breast cancer unit at Bradford hospitals NHS trust was victimised by managers and driven to resign, an employment tribunal heard in August 2002. Earlier, a doctor (a cancer specialist) had been dismissed after raising similar worries about the treatment of 168 women, but won a tribunal case for unfair dismissal earlier this year. The trust's director of human resources also lost his job after complaining about the way the complaints were handled. Mrs Mounsey told the hearing in Leeds that a bullying situation arose after a critical report on the city's breast cancer service. A consultant, Robert Phipps, had been appointed as a result and Ms Mounsey was his personal assistant. But his life had been made difficult from the start, she said, and then she too was intimidated.

[See: Martin Wainwright’s report in ‘The Guardian’ of Tuesday August 13, 2002.]

National Health Service & Democracy: Wales

Sheila Porter-Williams (Nov. 2002)

Membership Officer, Freedom to Care

I have been concerned for many years with helping make sure that the Health Service is made democratically accountable to the people that it serves at a local level. I have what seems to be a success story in Wales. In 1999 I wrote to the newly elected Assembly Members highlighting the lack of democratic accountability in the Health Service and suggesting that they should stretch to the limit their devolved powers and establish a network of democratically elected health authorities. Now, one of the Bills in the Queen's Speech is to establish twenty two democratically elected health authorities in Wales, sharing boundaries with the existing local authorities.

We will need to watch the legislation to check that the governance of the health authorities really will be democratic. Then the test will be in how many of the 22 areas democratic accountability will make a practical difference to service users.

Meanwhile in England we will have to make do with a divisive system of Foundation Hospitals. Any democracy in the Health Service will at best be patchy. The traditional management style of the Health Service across the country still often relies on intimidation, bullying and the suspension of whistleblowers and seems to be nearly as bad as the worst in local government and not accountable to anybody.

Nov. 2002