Nivedita

THE REGULATOR FIRED THE MAN WHO TOLD THEM PATIENTS WERE BEING HARMED. Shyam Kumar is a consultant orthopaedic surgeon. From 2015 he worked part-time for the Care Quality Commission @CareQualityComm as a specialist adviser on hospital inspections. He used that position to do exactly what it existed for. He raised concerns about unsafe inspection practices. He flagged a surgeon at Morecambe Bay NHS Trust whose operations were harming patients. He warned that trust management was trying to bury it. He told the CQC that patient safety was being "significantly compromised." He did his job. The CQC's response was to treat his disclosures as a nuisance and a threat rather than recognise their seriousness. The decision to sack him in December 2018 was explicitly linked to his disclosures. A senior CQC official maintained that Kumar had been dismissed for inappropriate behaviour, a position later comprehensively rejected by the Employment Tribunal. The CQC barrister called his claims "fanciful." The Manchester Employment Tribunal found him unfairly dismissed. The surgeon he flagged at Morecambe Bay eventually had conditions placed on his licence to practise. So not fanciful at all. Just inconvenient. This is the same regulator that had previously victimised CQC staff who spoke out about poor inspection methodology a decade earlier, at the time of the Mid Staffordshire Public Inquiry. They learned nothing. They just got better at paperwork. After winning, Kumar demanded to know what action the CQC had taken against the officials responsible for wrongly dismissing him and attempting to destroy his reputation. The answer, as far as the public record shows, is: not much. Ted Baker, the CQC's former Chief Inspector of Hospitals who maintained the CQC line against Kumar, was subsequently appointed Chair of the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch. A body that, presumably, requires sound judgement. The body that exists to protect patients fired the man protecting patients. Everyone else got promoted. Sources: BBC @BBCNews | HSJ | Westminster Confidential @davidhencke | Dr Minh Alexander @alexander_minh | Patient Safety Learning | BMA

120 DOCTORS ARE FIGHTING THEIR OWN NHS TRUSTS. NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT IT. Dr Amit Mukherjee raised patient safety concerns at his NHS Trust. That's not just his right. It's his legal duty. The NHS calls it a duty of candour. Apparently Trusts call it a provocation. What followed would be funny if it wasn't happening to a real person. The Trust launched a full employment tribunal against him. It hired expensive QCs to cross-examine him. It racked up around £90,000 in legal costs and then threatened to personally recover every penny from him if he lost. From a doctor. Who was trying to protect patients. He now avoids all interaction with colleagues. He hides. He takes only temporary roles. He is a consultant psychiatrist in one of the most understaffed specialties in the NHS and he is living like a man who accidentally witnessed a mob hit. And he is not alone. Around 120 clinicians are simultaneously fighting employment tribunals for whistleblowing right now. One hundred and twenty. The NHS set up Freedom to Speak Up Guardians specifically to protect people like Dr Mukherjee. He says they worked with senior management against him. The system designed to protect him became another instrument of the same pressure. That detail should be in every newspaper in the country. It is not. Nobody was sacked for retaliating against him. Nobody faced any professional consequences. The Trust just spent public money trying to financially ruin a doctor whose only offence was telling the truth about patient safety. This is not a broken system. A broken system produces accidents. This is a working system. It works exactly as intended. Speak up and we will make your life so miserable that every other doctor watching will know to stay quiet. Dr Mukherjee is still fighting. So are the other 119. If you know someone who works in the NHS, share this. They probably already know a version of this story. They just couldn't say it out loud. Sources: Counterfire (@counterfireorg), November 4, 2023 | Westminster Confidential (@davidhencke) | Protect (@WhistleUK)