CARREDAS

NHS HAS A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE FOR DESTROYING WHISTLEBLOWERS. Peter Gooderham was an academic lawyer and former doctor. He spent most of his working life trying to understand why @NHS staff who raised patient safety concerns kept ending up bankrupt, mentally broken, or both. Before he died in 2011, he sat down with Private Eye (@PrivateEyeNews) and documented the playbook in full. It goes like this. First, cut their secretarial support. Block their merit awards. Briefing against them informally. Tell colleagues they have attitude problems and can't move on. None of this is illegal. All of it is deliberate. Then dig up dirt. Real or invented. Allege mental illness. The stress of the process makes this self-fulfilling, which is convenient. Refuse to disclose documents. Claim it's a local employment matter. The Department of Health will back this up because they always do. Then apply to the Treasury for public money to pay them off and shut them up. Some gagging agreements require the whistleblower to sign statements saying all their concerns have been addressed. Even when they haven't. Even when people are still dying. If they refuse the money, send the lawyers. Threaten libel. Throw public funds at employment tribunals, where NHS trusts are seasoned professionals and the whistleblower is walking in alone. If the trust loses, appeal. Keep appealing until the whistleblower runs out of money. The public purse is unlimited. Their savings are not. And if none of that works, don't worry. Public inquiries are, in Gooderham's own words, belated exercises in grief management that seldom change anything. By the time one arrives, the people responsible have moved on and the problems are dismissed as historical. The Gooderham playbook was not a historical curiosity. A @Channel4 investigation found gagging clauses in 55 of 64 NHS compromise agreements sampled. Over 40 NHS organisations refused to provide information on how many they had signed. One trust wanted over £10,000 just to produce the information. Another argued you couldn't even publish their reasons for refusing. This is a system that was designed, iteratively, over decades, to neutralise whistleblowers. The public funds the mechanism. The mechanism silences the people trying to protect the public. And then a public inquiry happens 15 years later and describes the culture as disappointing. Source: Private Eye (@PrivateEyeNews) Shoot the Messenger, Dr Phil Hammond (@drphilhammond) and Andrew Bousfield