A consultant obstetrician has claimed he was sacked from his hospital for raising whistleblowing concerns about patient safety over fears they would cause “reputational damage”.
Martyn Pitman told an employment tribunal in Southampton that managers dismissed his concerns and he was “subjected to brutal retaliatory victimisation” after he criticised senior midwife colleagues.
He said: “On a daily basis there was evidence of deteriorating standards of care. We were certain that the situation posed a direct threat to both patients’ safety and staff wellbeing. Concern was expressed that there was a genuine risk that we could start to see avoidable patient disasters.”
Rather than addressing these, Pitman said the trust had considered it “the path of least resistance to take out [the] whistleblower”.
Pitman was dismissed this year from his job at the Royal Hampshire County hospital (RHCH) in Winchester, where he had worked as a consultant for 20 years. He is claiming he suffered a detriment due to exercising rights under the Public Interest Disclosure Act.
He said he “fought against [an] absolute barrage of completely unprofessional assaults on me” after he raised concerns about foetal monitoring problems that resulted in the death of a baby and the delivery of another with severe cerebral palsy.
Source: The Guardian, 26 September 2023
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