Richard Designator

NHS CALLED HIM A NUISANCE. A TRIBUNAL CALLED IT A WITCH HUNT. Andrew Smith spent 28 years as an NHS nurse. Served in the Gulf War. Not a single blemish on his record. Then he raised concerns at Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust @MSEHospitals about staff being wrongly denied recruitment and retention payments. He pushed. He represented his colleagues. He did exactly what a union rep is supposed to do. The Trust decided he was a nuisance. They hit him with a disciplinary process. Then they sacked him for gross misconduct. He took them to tribunal. Won. The judgment described what happened to him as a witch hunt. Senior nursing officers were personally criticised for their conduct. The Trust appealed. Lost again. Then came the remedy hearing, where reinstatement should have been the obvious outcome. Instead, a trust manager told the Employment Tribunal that they were worried Andrew might continue raising concerns if he came back. A manager told a tribunal, out loud, that they did not want their own vindicated employee reinstated because he might keep flagging problems. He was not reinstated. Meanwhile, one of the senior nurses found by the tribunal to have mistreated him walked straight into a director role at NHS Improvement. No consequences. A new title. A better salary. Andrew Smith's children had to use their own savings to keep him and his wife housed. He had been effectively blacklisted from @NHS work, unable to secure positions he was more than qualified for. He wrote to the National Guardian's Office (@NatGuardianFTSU) asking for help with reinstatement, as they had promised in 2017 to support unfairly dismissed whistleblowers. They declined to review his case while tribunal proceedings were still ongoing. Source: minhalexander_com / Dr Minh Alexander and others

NHS SPENT MILLIONS SILENCING SIX DOCTORS. EVERY SINGLE ONE WAS RIGHT Private Eye @PrivateEyeNews called them the Super Sextet. Six doctors and executives who saw dangerous things happening in NHS hospitals, raised the alarm, and were systematically destroyed for it. Not one of them was wrong. Every single concern turned out to be valid. Dr Kim Holt @drkimholt warned Great Ormond Street Hospital that the child protection clinic in Haringey was dangerously understaffed and missing patient records. Management put her on special leave for four years. Baby Peter Connelly died. The trust spent £286,000 on consultants to investigate itself and found no management failings. Then it offered Holt £120,000 to sign a super-gag and disappear. She refused. Steve Bolsin, cardiac anaesthetist at Bristol Royal Infirmary, spent six years documenting that children were dying at an entirely avoidable rate during heart surgery. He raised it internally. He raised it with the Department of Health. He was told to keep his head down. Between 30 and 35 children died unnecessarily. Bolsin was described at a European surgeons conference as the most hated anaesthetist in Europe. He left the UK in 1995 and never came back. Ash Pawade turned around a catastrophic children's heart surgery unit in Bristol. When a baby died after an overworked perfusionist made a drug error caused by NHS staffing cuts, Pawade backed his colleague and called management to account. He was ordered to apologise for impugning the trust's legal team. He left the NHS without any recognition. Dr Raj Mattu, a world-renowned cardiologist in Coventry, watched a patient die because five beds had been crammed into a ward designed for four, leaving three beds with no access to oxygen or suction. He reported it. A senior manager responded by saying he wanted Mattu off the road completely. Mattu was suspended for six years, then sacked. The trust spent over £14 million of public money trying to discredit him. He was eventually awarded £1.22 million. The CEO who oversaw the campaign against him was given a CBE. Gary Walker was brought in to turn around United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust after seven CEOs in six years. He balanced the books and hit the targets. When a winter surge led clinicians to warn that patient lives were at risk, Walker wrote to his Strategic Health Authority. The SHA's chief executive emailed back: you need to meet targets whatever the demand. Walker was sacked in 2010 for gross misconduct. The gross misconduct was using the f-word nine times in three meetings over two years, not directed at anyone in particular. Dr Peter Wilmshurst, consultant cardiologist at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, spent 30 years reporting research fraud, confronting pharmaceutical companies, and taking on anyone who put profit above patient safety. He was sued for libel three times by a US medical device company after accurately reporting that their product did not work. The legal battle nearly cost him his home. The same playbook runs across all of them: suspend the whistleblower, bury them in vexatious complaints, pay management consultants to clear management, offer a gag clause, and wait for the person to break. @NHS spent millions silencing these six people. Not one manager faced meaningful consequences for any of it. Source: Shoot the Messenger, @PrivateEyeNews Special Report by Dr Phil Hammond @drphilhammond and Andrew Bousfield