Hundreds of senior doctors have been driven out of their jobs in the NHS after raising concerns about patient safety, a campaign group has claimed.
The senior consultants say managers of NHS trusts employ a playbook of “dirty tricks” to sack whistleblowers or force them to move trusts or take early retirement. Justice for Doctors (JFD), which represents 140 whistleblowing doctors, claims some have been forced to sell their homes to pay legal fees, had their careers destroyed and had been pushed to the brink of suicide.
They are calling for Post Office-style compensation for those who have lost their jobs and had mental health problems, and want hospital managers to be regulated and face reprisals if patients suffer.
Dr Jane Somerville, 91, an eminent cardiologist involved with Britain’s first heart transplant in 1968, said: “This is an utter injustice to my profession. Why should managers have this right to treat us in this way? I’m not putting up with it. They have no right to destroy good people in this way.”
Salam Al-Sam, a consultant histopathologist and whistleblower, is being compared by some to the Post Office campaigner Alan Bates after he brought 140 doctors together in JFD. The group ran a conference on whistleblowing in London on Thursday at the Royal Society of Medicine.
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“There are hundreds of cases … [where those] who spoke out were excluded, dismissed or made redundant,” he said. “Regulating managers is number one because they are abusing taxpayers’ money freely. Doctors who have been damaged significantly and left with no job should be compensated.”
Police are investigating 40 surgery deaths at University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust after two doctors blew the whistle and were sacked.
Medics claim trust internal investigations into doctors’ clinical practice or behaviour is the first of four key tactics used to force troublesome staff out. Doctors claim they are then victimised and harassed, threatened with referral to the General Medical Council, or sacked. Trusts are then able to marshal hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ funds into defending cases at the employment tribunal.
On Thursday, a consultant, Martyn Pitman, said he had become a “pariah” when he was confronted with bullying and harassment allegations after blowing the whistle on maternity care. The obstetrician gynaecologist, 58, who worked for the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, was driven into retirement by his five-year ordeal. Despite 26 years of what he called “flawless appraisals”, he was placed under a maintaining high professional standards investigation when he raised concerns.
He said he was met with allegations of bullying, harassment and undermining behaviour, and that when these were dropped the trust found new reasons to remove him. A process that was expected to take six months took many years. He claimed his concerns were confirmed in a Care Quality Commission report in February 2022.
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He said his representative for the British Medical Association union told him that trusts “deliberately extend it because they want to break you. They want to absolutely destroy you”. Pitman told the conference: “You suddenly see yourself as a pariah when the whole thing was turned around, and I was confronted with allegations of bullying, harassment and undermining behaviour.”
The judgment in his employment tribunal, in October last year, found that Pitman was not sacked because of whistleblowing, and ruled it was the “communication style and not the message he was trying to convey”. A spokesman for Hampshire Hospitals said: “In 2019, four midwives raised a formal grievance into Mr Pitman’s behaviour citing evidence of bullying and intimidation. The investigation that followed concluded that his behaviour had a significantly negative impact on a number of his colleagues.
“Independent external investigations were commissioned — at Mr Pitman’s request — to ensure that the peer-led managing high professional standards process was implemented fairly, with one concluding that ‘[I] do not consider that the investigation itself was unreasonably protracted.’”
Azhar Ansari, another consultant, said his experience of blowing the whistle was as “traumatic as a war zone”. The gastroenterologist was forced to leave his job after he raised concerns about staffing and deaths at East Surrey Hospital. Four years after he blew the whistle he is still waiting for his case to be heard at an employment tribunal, which is scheduled for November.
“They made false allegations basically that I was a madman,” he said. “They went after the person rather than the patient safety concerns I was raising. It was horrible, it was traumatic, it was like coming back from a war zone.”
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In 2017 Linda Doherty starved to death in East Surrey Hospital, leading her family to say staff “lacked humanity” and let her “waste away”. “This happened in front of me,” Ansari told the conference. “The culture I worked in, the doctors did not want me to come and see the patient [Linda].”
Ansari has left his job and taken on a new position at King’s College Hospital NHS Trust. “I felt that if I didn’t speak up for my patients, no one else would,” he told the conference. “I raised concerns, and now my ability to deliver care — I was robbed of that. I’ll never have that back. The same stories were happening 15 years ago, there was [the scandal at Mid Staffordshire Hospital], and the cases now, including Lucy Letby. What’s changed? Nothing.”
Professor Philip Banfield, chairman of the council of the British Medical Association, told The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday that whistleblowing “is not welcomed by NHS management … NHS trusts and senior managers are more concerned with protecting personal and organisational reputations than they are with protecting patients”.
A survey of 526 hospital doctors by the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association found that more than seven in ten doctors believe they cannot blow the whistle without harming their careers, and 95 per cent believed hospital managers are not held accountable for harm caused to patients. It also found that two-thirds of whistleblowers have had their personal life and career affected, including mental health, being overlooked for promotion or targeted with investigations or referrals to the GMC.
Bullying is “predictable and universal”, doctors told the survey, and anything that challenges the aim of getting waiting lists down “is viewed poorly even if patient safety is at risk”. “Toxic” departments mean those who stand up for patients are forced to change jobs, they claimed, as doctors complain about being dangerously overworked with rotas of 71 hours per week.
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A spokesman for Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust said: “While we are unable to comment on an ongoing legal case, patient safety is at the heart of everything we do and we will always investigate any concerns that are raised to us.”
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, where the police investigation into 40 deaths is taking place, is cooperating with the force, deny the two whistleblowers raised concerns in good faith and will defend their claims at employment tribunal. Hampshire Hospitals NHS Trust, where Pitman was a doctor, was contacted for comment.
