maggieann What's happened to Socialism?

NHS FIRED ITS OWN CEO John Watkinson started his NHS career as a hospital porter in 1974. He worked his way up over 35 years to become chief executive of Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust @RCHTWeCare. He dedicated his entire professional life to the health service. Then he got legal advice confirming that the NHS was legally required to hold a public consultation before moving upper gastro-intestinal cancer surgery out of Cornwall to Plymouth. He raised it at a board meeting in August 2008. He did his job. NHS South West Strategic Health Authority had other plans. They were obsessed with moving those cancer services and John Watkinson was standing in the way. He was suspended. Then sacked. April 2009. The employment tribunal later found that the trust dismissed him under direct pressure from the SHA specifically because he would have attended a key committee meeting and repeated his legal advice, which would have blocked their plans. The tribunal called the dismissal process a thing that "flew in the face of any concept of fairness." The subsequent NHS appeal process was described as "a travesty." He was awarded £1.2 million in compensation. The trust appealed that too. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley ordered an independent top-level review. That review later concluded the pressure on the trust was justified. Because of course it did. John Watkinson told journalists his dismissal was still blocking him from finding senior work. He said he held out little hope of returning to the service he spent his whole career building. A man who started as a porter, spent 35 years serving patients, and warned his employer they were breaking the law got fired for it. The institution that fired him kept going. Nobody faced consequences. SOURCES: @BBCNews, @theindependent, @guardian, Employment Tribunal judgment, UKEAT/0378/10/DM