Following the Bureau’s investigations into gagged NHS whistleblowers, Private Eye has challenged the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley to uphold his promise to ‘give teeth to the current safeguards for whistleblowers.’
On 9 June, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley pledged to improve whistleblower protection with amendments to The Public Interest Disclosure Act (PIDA).
Lansley made the comments while announcing a public inquiry into the scandal at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust.
The Eye highlights the case of Stephen Bolsin, the NHS’s most famous whistleblower, who was praised in parliament for raising concerns about standards of child heart surgery in Bristol nearly 20 years ago.
Despite being fully vindicated by a public inquiry, he became unemployable in the NHS and relocated to Australia where he continues to work monitoring clinical outcomes.
The PIDA is designed to stop employers from dismissing or victimising staff who raise concerns about unsafe or fraudulent practice. But as the Bureau reported two weeks ago, most doctors who invoke the act usually reach a settlement with their bosses to prevent these concerns being made public.
Going to court offers the best chance of being heard, but potential whistleblowers face a financial barrier as payouts in the UK tend to be swallowed up by legal costs and loss of earnings.
This is not the case in the US, where large payouts are often made to whistleblowers as our second report Drug Money, for Al Jazeera showed.
Private Eye states: ‘As well as publicly recognizing whistleblowers, Lansley needs to place a statutory duty on all NHS employers to report all serious concerns about patient safety or fraud to the Care Quality Commission and Monitor for investigation and publication.
‘Gagging clauses, and attempts to buy the silence of public sector workers raising genuine concerns in the public interest, must be outlawed,’ it adds.
