North Staffordshire NHS TrustIt is all about Cosmetic Appeal.
I think part of my determination to uncover the evidence related to Ward 87 is the fact that many people died on there over many years. I whistleblew in 1998 and if I wasn't going to do it, no one would. By then the problems had been ongoing for some years. The ward shut in 2005 courtesy of the fuss I made on various fronts. Thats a lot of people who died over a lot of years. While the Sentinel this week gleefully covered the Henshalls " Opps I forgot I signed the consent forms" story, I often think about the fact that the death rates on Ward 87 went unnoticed by paper. I sometimes do feel that if they had raised the concerns and evidence through the media, many people's lives could have been saved. Dave Blackhurst has done a good job of blocking this story but then he is a journalist interested in writing material that categorically undermines David Southall. As he once told me on the phone " No one is interested in a little ward in the middle of the hospital when there are David Southall stories about CNEP trials". He went onto tell me how the Sentinel wasn't interested in junior doctors. That was of course Dave Blackshursts response to patient deaths. In any case, as the years have shown the CNEP trial has been cleared of any wrong doing and the 2001 Creamer Report verified my concerns. So, it is not rocket science to simply smile at Dave Blackhurst after all these years and crow a little about who was right and who was wrong.
Anyway, enough of journalists who are a little too obsessed with David Southall. It is a shame they undermined the wrong doctor because there is nothing to find in relation to David Southall. Since 1998 they have side lined Ward 87 and the patient deaths therein. It is of course the people of Stoke on Trent who should question the Sentinel and ask them why these issues and reports were never featured. Perhaps this media block has something to do with the Labour Party Stoke on Trent MP Mark Fisher who lied about referring the matter to the Health Commission. When faced with the Parliamentary Commissioner, he told them that he had " deleted all documentation" to do with this ongoing issue. We simply have to question why Mark Fisher lied about this referral. The Health Commission received no referral of any nature from Mark Fisher.
In the Sentinel's obsession, they have failed the people of Stoke on Trent but lets hope when they are old, all these journalists end up on a Ward in Stoke on Trent lying in their urine with not enough staff to attend to them. It happens to everyone in the end. I always believe that those who overlook the suffering of others deserve the identical fate. Apart from all that, I do like the reading the Sentinel. I am of the view though that their health section would be a little better if Dave Blackhurst retired but we can't have everything can we. It was during this time that I understood that few newspapers would feature the real story. If the local paper was reluctant to feature the evidence, the mass media would be reluctant as well. Never one to give up, I decided to write this up myself. This I always believe is important in the interests of history, in the interests of other whistleblowers and more importantly in the interests of patients.
Over the years, I went on a long term fishing expedition. Fishing of course takes a fairly long time when the powers that be deny you the evidence you search for. It was for this reason that I used the tactics of complaints, Data Protection Act requests and then finally Freedom of Information Act requests to harvest data. Data was vital. It was vital because I believed I owed it to those who died. It become more of a hobby over the years that I did after midnight. In the end, you discover that once your trade union and defence unions fail you, you only have yourself to rely on to prove your innocence. It was always vital to prove that I was innocent of many accusations cast upon me and that dead patients deserved more respect.
To me, I needed to test the recommendations in the Bristol Inquiry, to see whether they actually functioned in the real world. It has taken me ten years to uncover a lot of the material I required. The desks I have are full of North Staffordshire NHS Trust investigation files. That is probably how long it would take any whistleblower to establish their innocence.
Of course, by the time you establish you are right and everyone is wrong, the world has moved on and few people care. In any case, I have always liked to win and this was not a topic I was going to let go. It was more a matter of principle than anything else, a discovery of what happened, a way of making sense and a way of putting the past into a vault behind you. You always hope that as a whistleblower patient care will improve, the NHS will become more transparent and the UK will learn to accept whistleblowers.
I had of course heard tales of many whistleblowers being left by the wayside and giving up but I decided that giving up was not within my genetics. I admit that times were hard but giving up was never an option. Afterall, in the end I was never treated half as badly as the patients on that Ward. I am told that North Staffordshire NHS Trust remembers me like a bad mark on their walls that cannot be painted over. I believe that is a good thing because they should remember that those they mistreat always return back much like a bad haunting. They should also remember that each time the hospital ends a person's life prematurely or hounds a junior doctor. Of course, we all know North Staffordshire NHS Trust hounds junior doctors because there were many before me who disappeared from medicine without a trace.
I don't like to disappear of course. I do though like to write and North Staffordshire NHS Trust knows this. History is important and lessons should be learned. North Staffordshire NHS Trust should also learn the vital lesson not to treat whistleblowers badly in the future because you never know what internet site they are going to set up and you never know what documents they harvested nor do they know what will be made public - all in the interests of transparency of course.
The problem with North Staffordshire NHS Trust is that they like dirty laundry. Their deep cleaning mechanism never works on the rats they have in management or the bugs they have floating around the hospital. With respect to me, the Trust has a fair amount of dirty laundry still to come out. They know it and I know it. They also know that they spent 1.5 million or more and hired a new person to deal with Penny Mellor and the Henshall complaints while patients died due to lack of care, lack of equipment and lack of staff. It is a question of economics and priorities of course. The hospital's priority was taking Penny Mellor's bizarre allegations seriously while they allowed patient after patient to die needlessly. Is that justice?
The Trust does not like talking about these things because they feel uncomfortable about this comparison but then I know more about the underworld of the Trust than even they do. We all know that patients dropped like flies and every junior doctor was always running to the Ward on a cardiac arrest call. The important thing about Ward 87 is that it is just one of many in the NHS. We just happen to have partial evidence on this specific ward. Ward 11 is probably an interesting example in North Staffordshire NHS Trust but we shall come to that another day.
This discussion by me is not about undermining North Staffordshire NHS Trust. Well, perhaps I am often a little razor sharp with them but in the end I think the odd snipe is what they deserve. They are afterall the Trust who attempted to frame me for something I never did just to terminate my medical career. On occasion, I am thankful for my own temperament in that I hate being a victim and I hate losing battles. The Trust though did a lot for the sake of concealing their dirty laundry. This is the problem with Dirty Laundry, it makes people act much like psychopaths. The Trust in 1998 was a bit like a half crazed lunatic on acid. The frenzy of a whistleblower had got to their heads and none of them knew how to manage a situation that they created. Finally, there was a whistleblower they could not control. Of course, they tried to get my tutor to tell me to "Keep Quiet" but I always knew in my mind that once I got out of Stoke on Trent - it was going to be Information Party Time of mass exposure for every single thing they did. I believed in equality. Equality was important as was balance and it was such a disappointment to all of them that they had to grudgingly admit that I was right - having attempted to tell the world and my colleagues that I was a criminal, a mad woman, a person who couldn't cope etc etc. Physics though was favourite subject of mine and it is important to know that for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction. I don't think I have ever met the face of so much corruption as I did in North Staffordshire NHS Trust. It is an ugly ugly face. Combined with a group of equally acid driven psychopaths - you get yourself a real anti whistleblower frenzy. The problem with psychopaths like this is that they influence everyone around them as well and those who want to speak out end up being crippled by this organisational control. It is at this point the line between good and bad is blurred for them. Patient deaths for instance didn't matter. What mattered to them was controlling the situation and even damage control. For me, I had no blurring between good and bad. I knew what I had to do because after trusting in many seniors and being lied to, you simply have to take matters into your own hands and drive the show. This also means never giving a damn about what anyone says about you anywhere.
I am of the view that one day they should apologise to me and admit what they did by letter to ALL the patients/ relatives. They won't though. They should tell the relatives about the nature of the ward but you see that would be impossible because that would subject them to mass litigation. This is mass litigation that the hospital would never survive. Oh dear, in 1998 Ward 87 was already known as the Ward with mass litigation but North Staffordshire NHS Trust knows why.
For many years, they attempted a cover-up with duck tape but over the years some evidence filtered to me mostly from the General Medical Council. Here is a summary I created earlier. There is of course a lot more where that came from. That is the problem with whistleblowers, you never know what document they have got and where they got it from.
Medical Division Memorandum
Ward 87
From Ms Teresa Fenech
Directorate Manager for Infectious Diseases City General Hospital Stoke on Trent.
Reference TF/CLS/005
18th May 1999
Point 3
" I informed you that I had undertaken an audit of every single patient on the ward the previous week. I identified a serious lack of baseline and routine observations. In the case of some patients there was also clearly a breach of policy and there was an apparent lack of misunderstanding from the staff of the importance of such issues. I informed you that in my opinion the level of care demonstrated for some patients on the ward at the time of my audit was nothing short of negligent"
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In May 1999, the Medical Division received an Adverse Incident Form from Ward 87 which identified a malfunction of a defibrillator used during resuscitation. A two stage investigation was began.
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A letter from Dr Colin Campbell to Dr John Green, Clinical Director at City General Hospital Stoke on Trent, read as follows: (CAC/ AR/LET 2nd December 1998) Point 2 (first page)
"To summarise other discussions that we have had on the medical PRHOs, I think that the following should be addressed within the directorate as a matter of urgency - (2) They should have proper clinical supervision at all times and help from a more experienced colleague... should always be available (The New Doctor GMC), On discussion with several of them they are still working without immediate supervision for significant periods.”
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2. A March 2002 report by the Commission of Health Improvement of a Clinical Governance Review at North Staffordshire NHS Trust found serious shortcomings in the supervision of junior doctors,
"CHI was informed that junior doctors working in medicine were often inadequately supervised and often left alone on wards, particularly on the medical assessment unit (MAU). During an evening visit we found only two junior doctors covering MAU, which was full to capacity, with a further junior doctor covering MAU and emergency admissions; one junior doctor covered the medical wards and one covered medical outliers but these patients could be on wards on either site. CHI felt this situation posed a potential clinical risk to patients.”
3. The 2002 report went on to say, in Paragraph 5.78:
"There were a number of concerns raised regarding support and supervision for junior doctors working in medicine. We were told of a number of occasions when it was felt there was a lack of support both during the day and when problems arise whilst oncall. The Trust has acknowledged that medical staffing at all levels is under resourced in medicine".
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