Patients are being put at risk by NHS bosses launching “sham investigations” into whistleblowers to shut down concerns, a former hospital chief executive who won a £1.4m bullying claim has said.
Dr Susan Gilby took over as chief executive at the Countess of Chester hospital in 2018 after it was rocked by the Lucy Letby case. She was awarded the payout – one of the biggest in NHS history – last month after a tribunal ruled she had been unfairly dismissed after raising concerns about alleged bullying and harassment by the chair of the hospital board.
An employment judge found that board members of the hospital conspired to unfairly exclude her and deleted documents when she launched legal action. Speaking to the Guardian, Gilby said she had been “traumatised” by the experience and made to feel like a “pariah in the NHS” for refusing to drop her concerns in return for a “non-job”.
The tribunal found that Ian Haythornthwaite, the chair of the Countess of Chester hospital NHS foundation trust, worked with three other senior figures to “engineer her dismissal” after Gilby raised a whistleblowing complaint about his “bullying and harassment”. Haythornthwaite, a former BBC executive, was judged to have worked with others to delete scores of documents, including private emails and WhatsApp messages, despite being legally obliged to retain them for the employment proceedings.
Gilby said she and her legal team were now exploring whether to make a criminal complaint against Haythornthwaite after the tribunal’s findings. One of the offences being considered as the basis for a possible complaint is alleged misfeasance in public office. Haythornthwaite told the Guardian he denied any allegation of criminal wrongdoing and said he would not comment on “unspecified allegations by unspecified people”.
Gilby is now calling for new regulations for senior NHS managers from non-clinical backgrounds, as well as a legally binding framework for how they operate. She said: “Sham investigations appear to be increasingly and frequently used as a way of manipulating somebody out of an organisation or closing down concerns inappropriately. I think it is a very common problem across the NHS.”
