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NHS FINGERPRINTED A DOCTOR FOR REPORTING A COLLEAGUE WHO WAS INJECTING DRUGS ON DUTY
Dr Patricia Mills was an anaesthetist at West Suffolk Hospital. In 2017 she saw a colleague injecting himself with drugs while looking after patients. She raised the alarm. The NHS's response was to investigate her.
Management hired handwriting experts and fingerprint analysts to work out who had been tipping off a grieving family about a potentially botched operation.
They narrowed the suspect list down to seven doctors. Four of them had one thing in common: they had all previously raised concerns about the self-injecting colleague.
Dr Mills was among them. She was off sick for six months. She said she thought she was going to lose a 30-year career.
The drug-injecting doctor continued to practice for years after her original disclosure.
When Dr Mills turned to the National Guardian's Office, the body specifically set up to protect NHS staff who speak up, she said its response was, in her words, literally useless.
The CEO who ordered the fingerprinting resigned when it became public.
An independent review in December 2021 fully exonerated Dr Mills. It called the fingerprinting incendiary and extremely ill-judged. It said the treatment she received verged on victimisation. It said her concerns were well-founded from the start.
So to recap. Doctor raises a patient safety concern. Hospital spends public money trying to unmask her. She gets sick. The wrongdoer keeps working. The regulator does nothing.
And three years later a review says yeah, she was right all along. Sorry about that.
Sources: The Guardian, BBC @BBCNews, The Telegraph @Telegraph, Patient Safety Learning @PSLearning, NHS England independent review by Christine Outram, December 2021

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