THE lead consultant on the neonatal unit where Lucy Letby worked said yesterday that hospital managers should be regulated in a similar way to doctors and nurses.
Dr Stephen Brearey condemned the fact that there is ‘no apparent accountability’ for what NHS managers do in trusts.
Dr Brearey said senior staff at the Countess of Chester Hospital were worried about reputational damage to the organisation, and instead of acting on his warnings he and his colleagues’ lives were made very difficult – so much so that they felt under attack.
‘You go to senior colleagues with a problem, and you come away confused and anxious,’ Dr Brearey said.
This experience is not uncommon in the NHS, he said, adding that he has been contacted by clinicians across the UK ‘in the last three days’ who tell him ‘clinicians raised concerns with senior members of the hospital and their lives were made very difficult by doing that.
‘I can’t emphasise enough how difficult a position this puts the clinician in. Carrying out your clinical practice in that environment is very difficult.’
He added: ‘Doctors and nurses all have the regulatory bodies that we have to answer to, and quite often we’ll see senior managers who have no apparent accountability for what they do in our trusts and then move to other trusts.’
Dr Brearey said he worries about senior managers’ future actions, as ‘there doesn’t seem to be any system to make them accountable, and for them to justify their actions in a systematic way’.
Meanwhile, the British Medical Association (BMA) commented yesterday on the General Medical Council’s (GMC’s) update of its good medical practice guidance, which details the principles, values and standards expected of doctors working in the UK – the first significant update to the guidance in 10 years.
The BMA said it welcomes and supports many of the individual updated standards, such as much needed clarity about unacceptable behaviours of sexual harassment and discrimination.
‘However,’ it continued, ‘significant concerns remain that when viewed together the expectations placed on individual doctors don’t reflect the current perilous state of the health service, and that many doctors do not believe their regulator will reach fair and proportionate decisions when concerns are raised about individual doctor behaviour or patient care.’
Professor Phil Banfield, BMA council chair, said: ‘While many of the updates are reasonable on an individual level, when placed in the context of an extremely challenging health service – navigating chronic under-resourcing and the biggest backlog in the history of the NHS – doctors are rightly concerned that this will simply extend opportunities for individuals to be scapegoated when services (and the systems behind them) fail to meet the needs of patients.’
Dr Banfield concluded: ‘Encouraging individuals to speak up and report bullying and harassment, for example, will not be effective if doctors do not trust those who they are complaining to or if complaints are not taken seriously when people do.’
