Were surgeon's safety concerns ever investigated?

Monday 11 July 2016

An independent body looking at why a leading surgeon was sacked before he even took up the job says there's no evidence his concerns for patient safety were ever investigated.

Dr Amar Alwitry had been offered a post at the General Hospital as a consultant in ophthalmology and was due to start work on December 1 2012, but just a week before taking up the job was told his contract had already been terminated.

He appealed, and the dispute has been rumbling on ever since. In a damning report two weeks ago the States Complaints Board was highly critical of how the Minister for Health and Social Services, the hospital administration and the States Employment Board had handled the whole affair.

That’s led to a war of words. Last week both the Minister for Health and Social Services and the States Employment Board (SEB) issued press releases saying they’d done nothing wrong.

The States Complaints Board (SCB) has now hit back: it says “both [press releases] contained a fundamental error of fact that cannot be left unanswered," and it has strongly rejected allegations that it went beyond its terms of reference. 

The SCB says that the SEB essentially believed Dr Alwitry’s safety concerns to be unfounded, and that he was raising issues over the theatre timetable as he simply wanted to spend more time with his family in the UK. 

The Complaints Board say they don’t know if this is true, or how valid Dr Alwitry’s concerns were, but as a leading authority in his field he should at least have been listened to and his claims investigated. The Board says there is no evidence that this was done. 

“We saw nothing in the evidence presented to us to suggest that Dr. Alwitry's concerns had been addressed, or if they had been addressed, that there had been any explanation given to Dr. Alwitry as to why the theatre timetable did not require amendment despite the concerns he raised. The SCB has no idea whether Dr. Alwitry's expressed concerns about patient safety were justified or not. The SCB is however quite clear from the evidence received that Dr. Alwitry's persistent attempts to seek alteration to the timetabling was a source of considerable annoyance and ever-increasing irritation to the powers that be at the Hospital.”

The SCB says it is at a loss as to how the minister and the States Employment Board can claim they have done nothing wrong when they failed to listen to the doctor’s concerns. “The SCB remains at a loss to understand such conviction when the process by which the decision was reached was so fundamentally flawed.”

The Board finishes its report with another call for the minister and States Employment Board to admit they made mistakes and to take action, but they are not hopeful.

"The immediate rejection of the SCB's findings by the Minister for Health and Social Services and by the States Employment Board does not suggest that the States departments involved will be reviewing the findings and recommendations with the same degree of open-mindedness with which they were made."