Features
USEFUL WEB LINKSUNISON has produced a very useful NHS staff handbook called
|
Verbal and physical abuse, suicide, indecent assault and rape were common at Broadmoor, alleges one whistleblower. Gary Flood examines how can unions help those who want to expose bad practice.
Blowing the whistle
There are 350 male patients at Broadmoor Special Hospital in Berkshire.
Men get sent to Broadmoor for crimes such as manslaughter, murder, severe
sexual offences and offences involving serious violence.
There are around 70 women as well. They get sent there mainly for arson
and other crimes stemming from mental disturbance.
But if what Julia Wassell (right), formerly a senior social worker at
the hospital, says is true those women enter a dangerous world at Broadmoor,
locked in with those men.
There they face at the very least constant verbal abuse - and at the worst
rape and indecent assault. So severe has some of this abuse been that
some women have committed suicide as a result, she alleges.
But we may never know the truth. Because Julia’s employers ignored
her warnings, then paid no attention to her attempts to use their own
internal whistle-blowing procedures to raise the alarm - and then, she
claims, forced her to resign after a series of more and more aggressive
responses to her complaints.
UNISON and the British Association of Social Workers have just helped
Julia with her case against her former employers for constructive dismissal.
The case was settled out of court a week before the planned industrial
tribunal after 18 months’ of wrangling.
Wassell was a dedicated NHS worker who’d won a number of awards and
was a promising manager, forced out for trying to get things changed.
This is a disturbing case. Here are some more statistics: Julia polled
some 28 women patients in her care. She says they reported 1,008 incidents
of verbal abuse, 64 occasions of sexual harassment, 5 rapes and 6 incidents
of consensual sex in the period 1998-2001. (Broadmoor has a policy where
there’s no sex permitted between male and female patients.)
Sexual incidents ranged from indecent exposure to rape. Julia claims two
women killed themselves in 1999 and another in 2000 as a result of the
trauma from such attacks.
Problems stemmed from poor supervision by staff with no clinical training
at sports events and occasions where there were no staff of any kind in
mixed-sex meetings and patient councils.
She says she first became concerned when in March 2001 she reported the
stories of some women patients to the hospital’s senior management
under the existing whistle-blowing procedures.
Things escalated until her resignation in April 2002 claiming constructive
dismissal as a result of management moves in response to her initiatives.
All mixed gender activities at Broadmoor were cancelled a week later.
That’s too little, too late says UNISON.
‘A lot of damage has already been done and that cannot be brushed
under the carpet,’ warns UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis.
Beyond the need to make sure all allegations of sexual abuse are properly
checked out, UNISON is worried that Julia’s bad experience will discourage
other NHS or public servants who feel they need to speak out.
Whistle-blowing is now sanctioned in law as a legitimate response to concerns
over patient safety. But they didn’t help here. Despite repeated
meetings with her line manager, hospital executives and non-executives,
then her local MP her warnings were ignored.
‘The whole purpose of the Public Interest Disclosure Act and clinical
governance post-Bristol was to encourage employers and employees to work
together openly to uncover wrongdoing,’ he warns.
‘My experiences illustrate that having a whistle-blowing policy itself
isn’t enough,’ says Julia.
‘Its effectiveness depends on senior managers being prepared to accept
there’s something wrong in their organisation, put it right and respect
the views of the publicly concerned professional.’
Contact the article's author Gary Flood
|
|
LOTS MORE FEATURESIncluding stress in the workplace, getting out of debt and the pensions crisis more... |
© Copyright 2008
