Friday, April 18, 2014

Protecting their own

There have been various hospital scandals around, North Stafford springs to mind, there was the MRSA scandal in my own neck of the woods and only the other day Maidstone Hospital who had the MRSA scandal shut down its gastro-keyhole surgery department because it couldn't guarantee the safety of its patients after the op.
In every case there's been some sort of attempt at a cover up and in the worst cases rather than clean up their act, they've a tendency to go after the whistleblower.
Mail.
A cardiologist sacked after blowing the whistle on shocking NHS failures was cleared of any wrongdoing yesterday – after a 13-year battle thought to have cost the taxpayer £10million.
Dr Raj Mattu, a leading heart surgeon, endured more than a decade of extraordinary bullying by his NHS bosses.
He was sacked after he exposed the fact that two patients had died in dangerously overcrowded bays at his hospital.
Instead of listening to his concerns over the shocking standards of care on the wards, bosses first suspended, then sacked him and then spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money pursuing him through an employment tribunal.
They also submitted more than 200 false allegations about him to the General Medical Council – all of which, he says, were rejected.
Dr Mattu wrote to the head of the NHS Sir David Nicholson – dubbed the Man with No Shame – about his treatment and the appalling care at the Walsgrave Hospital in Coventry, but received no reply.
Now, after the 13-year ‘David and Goliath’ battle, a tribunal yesterday found the surgeon had been unfairly dismissed.
This sadly is how things are done in the NHS, because managers back up managers and anyone rocking the boat is hounded out by the managerial clique running the place be they a doctor or a porter. They see it as faults = getting sued and in these days of no win no fee I sort of can see how the mentality developed. Though what I can;'t see is why they don't try to improve the problem rather than attempting to dismiss or sideline the whistleblower with false claims. Improving the bays would surely have cost a lot less than £10 million you'd think?
They very fact that they hounded this man through his career and into illness speaks volumes of the arrogance 'can do no wrong' attitude of the people running the HNS. Despite costing the NHS £10 million you can bet the next whistleblower will be treated in the exact same way in order to stop them lifting the lid on bad practices.
NHS the envy of the world? Don't make me laugh.

2 annotations:

Anonymous said...

We have the name of the whistleblower and the name of the man who he ended up writing to (and who ignored him). What we don't have is the name(s) of the person/people who spent years hounding this man and trying to destroy his career and reputation. Also, what we don't have is the decision to make this person/these people pay the costs out of their inflated salaries. If they also have to cash in their pension pots to make up the shortfall, then so much the better. This may then concentrate the minds of those whose job it is to ensure a high quality of medical care but are so negligent they fail to do so.
Penseivat

Kath Lissenden said...

It seems to me the majority of Hospitals are dangerous, last year my own ex local hospital managed to kill a dear friend of mine who went into have a routine exploratory op, they proceeded to nick her bowel and she bled to death internally at home the next day.
This particular hospital has a history of killing patients and the joke locally is don't go in if you don't want to come out in a wooden box.
It seems to me that hospitals that don't have high infections of MRSA, (a disease my mother caught in our local hospital which nearly A/ Ended her life and B/ almost cost her a leg she was bloody lucky in that she refused to be returned to the hospital and recovered in her own home)or highly suspect foreign surgeons, lack of nurses and general cleanliness issues are almost non existent.
No one seems to have a good word to say about 90% of the UK hospitals at the moment and emergency medical treatment seems to be in the direst straights of all.
Iv'e told my better half if anything ever happens to me under no circumstances am I to be taken to a hospital.