A whistleblower raised the alarm over patient safety at West Suffolk Hospital because of concerns about the behaviour of a doctor who had been seen injecting himself with drugs, the Guardian has revealed.
The incident had already prompted internal complaints from senior staff at West Suffolk hospital, but the whistleblower decided to take matters a step further when the same doctor was later involved in a potentially botched operation. The whistleblower then wrote to relatives of a dead patient and urged them to ask questions about the conduct of the doctor and his background.
When they did this, the hospital launched a widely criticised “witch-hunt” in an attempt to find out the identity of the leaker.
The doctor’s drug use, which the trust has never acknowledged until now, helps explain why it demanded fingerprint and handwriting samples from staff – tactics which the NHS regulator roundly condemned in a hard-hitting report last week.
Source: Guardian, 5 February 2020
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