healthmedicinet

John Marchant, the former head of security at Dudley Group of Hospitals trust,
claimed staff had routinely forced vulnerable patients to stay in their
rooms – and even confined them to their beds – despite them posing no danger
to anyone.

He said his security guards had become so concerned about the practice that in
one instance they had refused to restrain a child and warned bosses the
action was illegal. Mr Marchant also alleged that pensioners had been
subject to restraints when all they wanted was to walk around a ward, or
chat with fellow patients.

Mr Marchant said: “Detention is being used simply because the patient become
so frustrated at not even being able to go out for a walk in the hospital
grounds because there are no staff to accompany them.

“Some would go back to their rooms if you asked them, but others would have to
be closed in and it would be very distressing for them.”

He repeatedly raised his concerns over the practice with senior managers, but
was made redundant from the Dudley Group in December 2012.

The trust denied Mr Marchant’s claims and insisted it always acted in the best
interest of patients. However, it admitted that security staff had raised
concerns about the issue.

Following the revelations in The Sunday Telegraph, in January, the Department
of Health has ordered the Care Quality Commission, the health regulator, to
carry out an investigation into his claims.

2. Annabelle Blackburn

Annabelle Blackburn claimed says she felt effectively “blacklisted” and forced
to work in a neighbouring county after warning about potentially dangerous
problems at the Oxfordshire GP surgery where she was employed.

She said she had found blood test results ignored and emails going unanswered.
She also claimed to have found evidence that a woman had not been told about
a probable diagnosis of leukaemia, and a man who should have been told he
had prostate cancer.

Mrs Blackburn said the delays in acting on test results or information in
emails may have caused severe harm to several patients. In two cases she
feared that patients could have died prematurely because the information had
not been acted on.

But when the experienced nurse spoke out, other GPs in Oxfordshire were told
she was “exaggerating her concerns” and should not be regarded as a genuine
whistleblower.

When Mrs Blackburn took her case to a tribunal in 2012, a judge said that
members of the local primary care trust, since disbanded, had thought that
she was “making trouble”. Although Mrs Blackburn lost the case, the
employment tribunal agreed that the trust had failed to deal with the
complaints she had raised.

Mrs Blackburn said: “The way Oxfordshire PCT handled the situation was
terrible. They failed to treat the crisis at the clinic with any urgency and
then they tried to ignore and discredit me.”

3. The doctor “brushed under the carpet”

A doctor who worked at two hospitals at the centre of a scandal over patients
dying after keyhole cancer surgery claimed managers ignored him when he
tried to raise the alarm over poor standards and dangerous practices by
surgeons.

The doctor, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job, said he
and other members of staff were ignored when they tried to warn about the
behaviour of surgeons at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospitals. He said
his colleagues’s fears were “brushed under the carpet” and that managers
preferred to ignore their warnings rather than confront the way three
surgeons responsible for the keyhole procedure, Professor Amir Nisar,
Haythem Ali and Ahmed Hamouda, were working.

The doctor said: “I reported my concerns but I was just given the brush off.
Several other junior doctors, and nursing staff, expressed their concerns,
but they all had the same experience as me.”

He spoke out after a damning report found that managers at Maidstone and
Tunbridge Wells ignored repeated staff warnings dating back several years
about the behaviour of the surgeons.

This newspaper revealed in May how the hospitals were forced to stop carrying
out keyhole surgery for upper gastrointestinal cancer (GI), on the
instruction of The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS), following the unexpected
death of five patients who had undergone the procedure in December 2012 and
early 2013.

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust barred Prof Nisar, Mr Ali and Mr
Hamouda from carrying out the procedure on the recommendation of the RCS,
but they were allowed to continue general surgery at the hospitals.

4. Rebecca Prideaux

Rebecca Prideaux, a former inspector at Britain’s health and care watchdog,
claimed that elderly people were being left to suffer in appalling
conditions because regulators refused to act on warnings.

She said poor care routinely went unchecked because staff at the Care Quality
Commission (CQC) were given inadequate training. Workers were discouraged
from taking action when they uncovered risks to the most vulnerable, she
added.

Mrs Prideaux resigned from CQC in May last year, saying she had repeatedly
urged senior managers to improve the training given to hundreds of
inspectors who visit care homes and hospitals.

The former policewoman said she was put in charge of an inspection of a
120-bed care home the day after her induction finished, after witnessing
just two such inspections previously and receiving no advice on how to draw
up a report.

She accused regulators of failing to take proper action even after she warned
of appalling failings in care and claimed reports often omitted some of the
most damning failings.

Mrs Prideaux said: “When I joined CQC I was over the moon. I had cared for my
grandparents and I really believed in a job where you could make a
difference. In the end I was left feeling that if I cared, that was the last
place you should be working.”

The CQC said Mrs Prideaux’s views were not shared by the more experienced and
specialist inspectors who worked with her. But it said it had changed the
way it carried out inspections, in particular to ensure that all inspectors
are specialists in the areas they inspect.

5. Raj Mattu

Dr Raj Mattu, a hospital consultant who was “hounded mercilessly” out of his
job after raising concerns about patient safety, won a landmark legal
victory for unfair dismissal in April, following the longest-running and
most expensive whistle-blowing case in NHS history.

The cardiologist, was suspended for eight years, then sacked in 2010, after
warning that patients were dying because of cost-cutting practices
introduced by the then Walsgrave Hospital hospital, in Coventry.

NHS bosses hired private investigators in an apparent attempt to discredit
him, spending an estimated £6?million in pursuit of the case
against him.

MPs said the employment tribunal ruling, which found the whistleblower had
been unfairly dismissed, shone a light on a “sinister and dystopian” culture
of cover-up within the NHS, which destroyed the lives of those who tried to
speak up for patients.

Dr Mattu said: “My treatment by the trust over the past 13 years has damaged
my health, my professional reputation and my livelihood and its effects on
my personal and private life have been devastating.”

University Hospital of Coventry and Warwickshire NHS trust said it was
disappointed by the employment tribunal’s decision.

6. Roger Davidson

Roger Davidson lost his job as head of media and public affairs for the Care
Quality Commission just before the 2010 general election, after telling how
a quarter of NHS trusts had failed to meet basic hygiene standards.

He also warned that the CQC had stopped telling the public how to find reports
on infections in their local hospitals in order to limit publicity damaging
to the NHS.

Mr Davidson was forced to sign a gagging order when he left but his testimony
emerged during the Francis inquiry into appaling failings at Mid-Staffs
which led to hundreds of “excess deaths”.

It formed part of a tranche of documents which detailed how the regulator was
apparently intent on suppressing negative publicity about the NHS, amid
political pressure from then Labour ministers and their advisers before the
election.

Mr Davidson, who went on to become head of media at NHS England, said: “The
message that ‘we don’t want bad news’ infected the whole organisation. There
was no compass.”

7. Professor Narinder Kapur

Professor Narinder Kapur was dismissed as a consultant neuropsychologist and
head of neuropsychology at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge after voicing
his concerns about patient safety and poor standards of care.

Cambridge University Hospitals trust (CUH) dismissed Prof Kapur in 2010,
claiming there had been a breakdown in their relationship because of his
management style and working methods.

But in July 2012 an employment tribunal ruled that he had been unfairly
dismissed. It added: “The tribunal condemns unreservedly the way in which
the NHS has conducted itself in respect of this allegation.”

However, because the tribunal found Prof Kapur had not been sacked because of
his whistle-blowing, but because there had been “an irredeemable breakdown
in trust, confidence and communication” between him and other managers, it
did not order his reinstatement.

Prof Kapur, 64, who is now a consultant neuropsychologist at Imperial College
Healthcare Trust and visiting professor of neuropsychology at University
College London, said: “I raised my concerns about staff shortages and the
impact on patient care several times to my line managers, I had a duty to do
so on behalf of my patients, but I was repeatedly ignored by the hospital
senior management. If that can happen to a professor like myself, with a
worldwide reputation in his field, imagine what happens when more junior
members of staff try to raise the alarm.”

8. Sharmila Chowdhury

Sharmila Chowdhury had enjoyed an unblemished 27-year career with the NHS
until she was sacked after blowing the whistle on senior doctors who were
moonlighting at a private hospital while being paid to treat NHS patients.

The radiology service manager at Ealing Hospital trust repeatedly warned the
hospital’s senior managers that doctors were dishonestly claiming thousands
of pounds every month and that the trust had lost £250,000 of public money
through such arrangements.

Ealing hospital failed for two years to take any action against the two
doctors later accused of fraud at a tribunal hearing. Instead, Ms Chowdhury
was suspended after a counter-allegation of fraud made against her by a
junior whom she had reported for breaching patient safety. The allegation
was never proven and in July 2010 the employment tribunal judge took the
unusual step of ordering the trust to reinstate Ms Chowdhury’s full salary.
However the trust made her post redundant and the case was eventually
settled out of court.

Ms Chowdhury, a widow with a teenage son, received two years pay, although
£77,000 of that was paid out in legal fees. She found her whistle-blowing
made it hard for her to find further employment in the health sector. She is
also fighting cancer.

Ms Chowdhury, 54, who met Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, in June, to
discuss the plight of whistle-blowers, said: “The public has a right to know
what is happening with public money. Despite winning a hearing in which I
was proven to be a whistleblower, I’ve no job and no money.”

9. Helene Donnelly

Helene Donnelly raised more than 100 complaints about the way patients were
being treated at Stafford Hospital while she was working there as a nurse in
Accident and Emergency.

She became was a key witness during the Mid-Staffs public inquiry into reports
of poor care, abuse and neglect of care at the hospital, where there were
between 400 and 1,200 more deaths than would normally have been expected
between 2005 and 2008.

In her evidence, Ms Donnelly said nurses in AE were expected to break
rules as a matter of course in order to meet targets, including falsifying
records to pretend that patients had not been kept waiting for more than
four hours.

When she raised her concerns she was met with threats and bullying by some of
her more senior colleagues. At one stage she had to ask members of her
family to come and pick her up when she finished a shift a night because she
was afraid to walk back to the car on her own.

Ms Donnelly was appointed an OBE in May for her services to the NHS, in
recognition of her work to support hospital staff to raise concerns and
improve care for patients.

She is now an ambassador for cultural change at the Staffordshire and
Stoke-on-Trent Partnership NHS Trust and works to relay staff concerns to
the chief executive and is helping the Department of Health draw up
whistle-blowing training for NHS staff.

Ms Donnelly said: “I am frequently being contacted by individuals from all
over the UK who have tried to speak out at their own trusts, but find they
are ignored. Far too many who hold positions of power – and who could affect
change – are still dragging their feet while patients and staff continue to
suffer.”

10. Kim Holt

Kim Holt, a consultant paediatrician, was suspended after she told managers
about serious failings at the clinic where Baby P was later treated just
days before his death at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend.

Ms Holt and three colleagues wrote to managers in 2006, warning that
understaffing and poor record keeping posed a serious risk to patients’
safety at St Anne’s clinic in Haringey, north London, and that a child would
die if action was not taken. But bosses ignored her warnings and removed her
from the clinic.

Baby Peter Connelly was seen by an inexperienced locum doctor, Sabah
Al-Zayyat, at St Anne’s in the summer of 2007, three days before he
was killed and some time after Ms Holt and her fellow whistle-blowers had
left. Zayyat failed to spot signs that the 17-month-old boy, who was on
Haringey’s child protection register, had been physically abused.

Ms Holt later said: “I believe that if our concerns had been taken seriously
at the time we raised them, then we could have prevented the death of Baby
Peter. Several of the failings found by the inquiries into his death were
100 per cent the same as the failings we complained about the year before he
died.”

She also said the hospital had offered her £120,000 to withdraw her complaints
in the wake of Peter’s death – a claim the hospital denied.

In 2011 Great Ormond Street hospital and Haringey primary care trust, which
co-managed the clinic, formally apologised to Ms Holt, who is currently
advising the CQC on how the regulator can help support staff who raise
concerns about standards of care.

11. David Drew

Dr David Drew, a consultant paediatrician at Walsall Manor Hospital claimed he
was sacked after raising the alarm in the case of a toddler who died after
being discharged from the hospital.

Kyle Keen had been admitted to Walsall Manor on June 21, 2006, where bruises
were noted but no follow-up action was taken and he was discharged. The
toddler was then admitted to the the paediatric intensive care unit at North
Staffordshire Hospital, in Stoke-on-Trent, on June 29 with a brain injury
and died a day later.

Kyle had been shaken by his stepfather Tyrone Matthews, then aged 25, who was
sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for manslaughter.

Dr Drew said he had tried to raise concerns over his death and warned that his
case should have been referred to social services.

The hospital was criticised in a serious case review in 2009 after it emerged
nurses treating Kyle for a stomach upset had spotted suspicious bruises on
his body a week before he was admitted with the brain injury.

Matters had came to a head after Dr Drew emailed a prayer around his
department in April 2009, hoping it would help motivate his colleagues. The
65-year-old, who had an unblemished 37-year career in the NHS, was told to
“keep his religious beliefs to himself” by a review panel called to
investigate his conduct in March 2010.

He was sacked for gross misconduct and insubordination for failing to accept
the panel’s instructions and for disclosing confidential information in
relation to other matters.

Dr Drew said the email had been used as a smokescreen to push him out of his
post. He said: ‘My case was never about the religion, it was about the fact
the hospital wouldn’t listen to its most senior paediatrician telling them
they were cutting costs to the bone and putting patient safety at risk. It’s
all about whistle-blowing.”

In April 2012 an employment tribunal rejected his claims of unfair dismissal,
religious discrimination and victimisation against Walsall Hospitals NHS
Trust.

12. Kay Sheldon

Kay Sheldon, a non-executive director of the Care Quality Commission, feared
patients’ lives were being put at risk because the NHS’s official regulator
was not doing its job properly.

After she raised concerns at the Mid-Staffs public inquiry, the CQC’s then
chairman called for her to be immediately suspended, then ordered an
assessment of her which suggested she could be suffering from paranoid
schizophrenia.

Ms Sheldon, who had been open about her history of depression, said: “They
were trying to discredit me as either mad or bad, as mentally ill or a
troublemaker – it’s shocking the lengths they were willing to go to in order
to get me out.”

She refused to sign a gagging order and last June told The Sunday Telegraph:
“I am worried that the regulator has been giving false assurances that
hospitals are safe, when they are not, and that could mean patients are at
risk, it could mean that they are harmed and it could mean that some die,
when their deaths could have been prevented.”

The following month she was vindicated by an inquiry into the Morecambe Bay
baby deaths scandal, which accused CQC of presiding over a “cover-up” of
their failings.

While the former managers involved denied her accusations, the organisation’s
new management is now radically overhauling its inspection methods.

Ms Sheldon said that the CQC had been under pressure to avoid “finding another
Mid Staffs” in the wake of the 2009 scandal.