Katrina Hoogendam

THE INSPECTOR WHO INSPECTED TOO HONESTLY Dr Shyam Kumar @ukorthopod is an orthopaedic surgeon. A good one. Unblemished record. So the Care Quality Commission (@CareQualityComm) recruited him as a part-time inspector to help hold NHS hospitals to account. He took the job seriously. Too seriously, it turns out. Between 2015 and 2019 he raised concerns about botched hospital inspections, a bullying culture inside the CQC itself, and a surgeon at Morecambe Bay whose hip replacement on an elderly patient left her unable to walk. He asked the CQC to review that surgeon's cases. He was told the trust did not want to do so for reputational reasons. A Royal College of Surgeons review later found problems with 26 out of 46 of that surgeon's operations. The CQC's response to Kumar? They called his concerns fanciful. They dug for dirt on him. Then they sacked him. In September 2022 a Manchester Employment Tribunal ruled he had been unfairly dismissed. The tribunal found his safety disclosures had directly influenced the decision to get rid of him. The judgment noted that CQC officials spent their energy gunning him down rather than focusing on patient safety. He was awarded £23,000 for injury to feelings. Not damages for a ruined career. Not accountability for the officials who ran the smear operation. Just £23,000 and a declaration. The CQC issued a statement saying it had learnt from the case and improved its processes. A decade earlier it said exactly the same thing after the Mid Staffordshire Public Inquiry found it had victimised its own whistleblowers then too. The system that was built to protect patients ran a seven-year campaign against the man raising the alarm. Then it said sorry and carried on. Source: @BBCNews, The Guardian, BMJ, Westminster Confidential (@davidhencke)