Agnes Ayton 💙

“They’ve had their lives completely demolished by this illness.” Millions are living with #LongCovid while society has moved on. Former Team GB rower @oonagh_cousins developed #MECFS following Covid and had to retire.

THE REGULATOR FIRED THE MAN WHO TOLD THEM PATIENTS WERE BEING HARMED. Shyam Kumar is a consultant orthopaedic surgeon. From 2015 he worked part-time for the Care Quality Commission @CareQualityComm as a specialist adviser on hospital inspections. He used that position to do exactly what it existed for. He raised concerns about unsafe inspection practices. He flagged a surgeon at Morecambe Bay NHS Trust whose operations were harming patients. He warned that trust management was trying to bury it. He told the CQC that patient safety was being "significantly compromised." He did his job. The CQC's response was to treat his disclosures as a nuisance and a threat rather than recognise their seriousness. The decision to sack him in December 2018 was explicitly linked to his disclosures. A senior CQC official maintained that Kumar had been dismissed for inappropriate behaviour, a position later comprehensively rejected by the Employment Tribunal. The CQC barrister called his claims "fanciful." The Manchester Employment Tribunal found him unfairly dismissed. The surgeon he flagged at Morecambe Bay eventually had conditions placed on his licence to practise. So not fanciful at all. Just inconvenient. This is the same regulator that had previously victimised CQC staff who spoke out about poor inspection methodology a decade earlier, at the time of the Mid Staffordshire Public Inquiry. They learned nothing. They just got better at paperwork. After winning, Kumar demanded to know what action the CQC had taken against the officials responsible for wrongly dismissing him and attempting to destroy his reputation. The answer, as far as the public record shows, is: not much. Ted Baker, the CQC's former Chief Inspector of Hospitals who maintained the CQC line against Kumar, was subsequently appointed Chair of the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch. A body that, presumably, requires sound judgement. The body that exists to protect patients fired the man protecting patients. Everyone else got promoted. Sources: BBC @BBCNews | HSJ | Westminster Confidential @davidhencke | Dr Minh Alexander @alexander_minh | Patient Safety Learning | BMA

#AMAD Meeting No. 4 April 21, 2026 45th Parliament, 1st Session Re: Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada (MAiD) -Eligibility of Persons Whose Sole Underlying Medical Condition is a Mental Illness parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/Pow…