A JUDGE CALLED IT A TOTALITARIAN REGIME.
In 1998, Dr Rita Pal (
@dr_rita39) was a junior psychiatrist working in the NHS in North Staffordshire. She walked onto Ward 87 at University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust and saw elderly patients having medication withdrawn.
People dying who did not have to die.
She raised the alarm with the Department of Health in 1999 and 2000.
The Sunday Times put her story on the front page on 2 April 2000. The headline was Elderly Helped to Die.
Nobody in authority did anything useful with it.
The General Medical Council (
@gmcuk) opened investigations into Dr Pal instead.
Then more investigations.
A decade of them.
Every single one eventually dropped. She was cleared each time.
The GMC later issued a formal apology for the distress caused to her.
A High Court judge reviewing one of those cases compared the GMC's conduct to a totalitarian regime, awarded her ÂŁ18,000 in costs, and said the expenses racked up against her were near impossible to justify.
She could not hold a permanent NHS post. Character assassination had made that impossible. She survived on short locum contracts, leaving each hospital the moment the rumour mill started.
That is how a UCL-trained doctor spent nearly a decade of her medical career.
She also brought the first civil whistleblower litigation of its kind against the GMC using Data Protection, Defamation and Human Rights law.
The profession's response was to brand her a serial litigant.
The Mid Staffordshire Inquiry concluded in 2010. Different trust, different hospital, 25 miles away. But both fell under the same strategic health authority.
Dr Pal argued that if her warnings had been acted on, the same oversight body could have caught Stafford earlier. Nobody tested that theory.
Dr Pal later described to The Guardian the long-term personal damage NHS whistleblowing inflicts, and how it can leave a doctor effectively unemployable in medicine.
Sources:
@thesundaytimes
@guardian
@HuffPostUK
@gmcuk