🎀 Michelle Diskin Bates 🎀

SHE WARNED THE NHS ABOUT DEAD BABIES. THEY SPENT £3 MILLION TRYING TO PROVE HER WRONG. Dr Feyi Awotona ran the labour ward at South Tyneside District Hospital, now part of @STSFTrust. She became a consultant in 1995. Between 1994 and 1998 she raised the alarm about high infant death rates and about how female patients were being treated on her watch. She also flagged concerns about certain male consultants in the gynaecology department. Nobody investigated any of it. Instead management built a case to get rid of her. She was sacked in December 1998 from a £68,000 a year post. The trust offered her £85,000 to disappear quietly. She said no, which in NHS terms is basically an act of defiance. In 2003 a Newcastle employment tribunal ruled her dismissal unfair and found she had been racially discriminated against. The trust's own medical director had told her that being a woman and Black limited what she could achieve at South Tyneside. He said this as if it were an explanation rather than a confession. The tribunal ordered reinstatement by April 2003. The trust initially refused, claiming 5 senior doctors would resign if she came back. They eventually agreed to comply. Then a new fight started over where she should do her retraining, and the whole process quietly stalled, because nothing in the NHS moves slower than a decision to admit fault. She resigned in 2005, worn down by years of waiting. That September she was awarded over £1 million in compensation. With legal fees the total cost to the trust was estimated at around £3 million, close to 3 percent of the hospital's entire annual budget, spent proving a doctor had been right all along. Newcastle North MP Doug Henderson backed her throughout the dispute. Unison's North East health lead Liz Twist criticised the trust for letting the case run on for 7 years of taxpayer funded stubbornness. Nobody was struck off. Nobody resigned in disgrace. The families of the babies whose deaths she flagged never got an answer about what happened to those concerns. This is what accountability looks like in the NHS. Spend millions making the person who noticed the problem disappear.

Police treating Ann Widdecombe's death as murder and hunting for white male suspect after body found with serious injuries bbc.in/4gqWEnD

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