A consultant obstetrician has claimed he was sacked from his hospital for raising whistleblowing concerns about patient safety over fears they would cause “reputational damage”.
Martyn Pitman told an employment tribunal in Southampton that managers dismissed his concerns and he was “subjected to brutal retaliatory victimisation” after he criticised senior midwife colleagues.
He said: “On a daily basis there was evidence of deteriorating standards of care. We were certain that the situation posed a direct threat to both patients’ safety and staff wellbeing. Concern was expressed that there was a genuine risk that we could start to see avoidable patient disasters.”
Rather than addressing these, Pitman said the trust had considered it “the path of least resistance to take out [the] whistleblower”.
Pitman was dismissed this year from his job at the Royal Hampshire County hospital (RHCH) in Winchester, where he had worked as a consultant for 20 years. He is claiming he suffered a detriment due to exercising rights under the Public Interest Disclosure Act.
He said he “fought against [an] absolute barrage of completely unprofessional assaults on me” after he raised concerns about foetal monitoring problems that resulted in the death of a baby and the delivery of another with severe cerebral palsy.
In a statement, Pitman said the merger of RHCH with Basingstoke and North Hampshire hospital NHS trust in 2012 “proved challenging due to significant differences in the philosophy of care and management style”.
He said this included an emphasis on natural birth over caesarians. “I was justifiably reluctant to follow the … senior midwifery-led, pro-normalisation model of care championed by our new partners. I believe that, in the 21st century, maternity care should be patient-focused with parents being able and supported to choose, with evidence-based advice, how and where to deliver their babies.”
This resulted in deteriorating morale in the RHCH midwifery team, including increased sickness and resignation rates, leaving “dangerously low staffing levels preventing safe levels of patient care”, Pitman said.
RHCH midwives elected him to act as their “spokesperson and sounding board” in relation to their concerns about the new senior midwifery management, who came from the Basingstoke hospital, and which Pitman believed had been appointed “on the basis of friendship rather than professional merit”.
When Pitman arranged a one-on-one meeting to inform a midwifery leader that her colleagues were contemplating a vote of no confidence in her, he was accused of bullying and harassment.
Hampshire hospitals NHS foundation trust’s barrister suggested Pitman had launched a “freelance campaign to stir up dissent instead of allowing these issues to be dealt with in an appropriately formalised way” by asking colleagues’ opinions of the senior midwives and setting up meetings.
Pitman said: “I had a professional responsibility and legal duty to voice my concerns related to patient safety and to represent the views of my colleagues. This is fully supported by the trust’s own guideline related to raising concerns and whistleblowing.”
Following this, Pitman was subjected to a formal maintaining high professional standards investigation that he viewed as “overly aggressive”. Pitman said he was downgraded after a “surgical complication” during a procedure carried out by a colleague without his knowledge while he was on call in March 2021.
A spokesperson for Hampshire hospitals NHS trust said: “Dismissal is always a last resort and since Hampshire hospitals was formed 11 years ago, no member of staff has ever been dismissed for whistleblowing or raising concerns over patient safety; and they never will be. We actively encourage our staff to raise any concerns they have in a number of different ways and support those who do so.
“The trust ensured that all issues raised by Mr Pitman were thoroughly and impartially investigated, including in some instances through external review. Every effort was made to repair his relationships with the maternity and clinical colleagues in question – efforts which were unfortunately unsuccessful.
“We are increasingly concerned that Mr Pitman’s representation of the reasons for his dismissal could discourage others from raising important issues.”
