What if whistleblowers had been gagged about this? By Steve Turner (UK)

This tragic case highlights the urgent need for INDEPENDENT scrutiny of #whistleblowing.

The Protection for Whistleblowing Bill introduces an #Officeofthewhistleblower to help prevent events like this, where people blew the whistle & were silenced. The Pediatricians raised the alarm and were bullied and threatened with referral to the GMC.

Current whistleblowing legislation - the Public Interest Disclosure Act [#PIDA] - fails everyone, #patients, relatives, clinicians, #healthcare staff, & the public.

The Protection for Whistleblowing Bill [Hl] which passed its second reading in December 2022, proposes the repeal of the current Public Interest Disclosure Act [PIDA], replacing it with an Office of the Whistleblower [OWB]. This would prevent concerns of genuine healthcare whistleblowers becoming buried under an employment issue, and their original patient safety concerns being side-lined. PIDA is expensive, limited in scope and beyond the reach of most whistleblowers.

PIDA is also overly complex, with cases currently waiting for over 2 years to be heard. Employers game the system to run whistleblowers out of funds. Fewer than 12% of cases that go to the Employment Tribunal win.

PIDA does not protect patients and is not accessible to members of the public who blow the whistle. Currently there is no statutory provision to investigate or address the wrongdoing highlighted by whistleblowers. Many whistleblowers have been denied any protection because they are not workers. For accurate info on the Protection for #Whistleblowing Bill read it here: https://lnkd.in/enPtFKYb

Editor’s notes:

The Letby case has been widely reported internationally, and is already on Wikipedia.

The New Zealand equivalent of the Public Interest Disclosures Act (PIDA) is the Protected Disclosures Act 2021. The GMC is the General Medical Council. We are unaware of any whistleblowers being dismissed and/or legally gagged with NDAs, although we have no doubt that an inquiry will find Countess of Chester Hospital’s whistleblower protocols to be deficient.