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NHS Whistleblowing

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Dr. Taylor) on securing such an important debate. Recently I was watching the regional television news—I believe that it was for Warwickshire, not Staffordshire—and there was a story of a doctor who was celebrating getting his job back seven years after he had been wrongly suspended from work for whistleblowing. It is one thing to say that there is already a law that protects people, but when clinicians read or see that they could have seven years of hell for whistleblowing, it is not that much consolation that the law is as it is. I was at a public meeting in Stafford last night, which I mentioned at Prime Minister's questions today. The room was packed with angry people who had suffered terribly either because of the loss of a relative or because of how they had been treated by the hospital. They told some frightening stories about hospital staff being bullied to make them toe management's line. We need to say that that is totally unacceptable throughout the national health service, and I was pleased that the Minister firmly stated that to be the case. I was interested by the hon. Member for Wyre Forest saying that in his day the hospital was run by the doctor, the nurse and the administrator. I have had a couple of letters since all this blew up in my local media, one from a retired consultant and one from a retired doctor. They both make the same point about the rise and rise of the manager. It is no longer the administrator but the manager who controls the hospital—the consultant has been pushed aside. One thing that we could say, independently of Stafford, is that Lord Darzi's report last year on quality care and restoring the centrality of the clinician's role in our health service is an important development that we must support and sustain. I am sorry to bring Stafford into the hon. Gentleman's debate, but he was right to say that, in the end, it is the public, the patients and the patients' relatives supporting a caring staff in the hospital, and the dialogue between the two groups, that will eradicate the kind of problems that he described and that I have just described in my brief contribution.