Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Praise for Lynne Featherstone over Great Ormond Street

Andrew Gilligan, now the Daily Telegraph's London editor, wrote an article yesterday about Great Ormond Street Hospital's dishonourbale attempt to absolve itself of its share of the blame for the death of Peter Connelly (Baby P).

Writing of one of the doctors who has blown the whistle on the hospital, he concluded:
Kim Holt is very lucky to have as her MP the superb Lynne Featherstone, who has been fighting her constituent’s corner for the last three years. The hospital has been sabre-rattling against her as well, publishing on its website a, shall we say, unsatisfactory account of its dealings over the issue. Ms Featherstone has now published her response – and she, too, accuses Great Ormond Street of “concealing” and “misleading.”
This kind of behaviour is always a deeply telling sign of an institution in real trouble. Ms Featherstone has called on Ms Collins to resign, and says that if what is known now had been known at the time, she would have gone three years ago, along with Haringey’s Sharon Shoesmith. I agree.

1 comment:

dreamingspire said...

For quite a while I have thought that Sharon Shoesmith's difficulty was that she was running a dept that was grossly under-resourced, and having to rely on a dysfunctional hospital. In that situation all that you can morally properly do is resign, but you need behind you a trades union or professional body that will help you prove the case or else your professional career will be totally ruined. Maybe in this post Blair/Brown era, we can see our way to do better in such disgraceful situations.

I, too, am a great admirer of Lynne F's work on this case. And I resigned from a situation that had also gone wrong, but thankfully nobody was hurt, and I was too close to the end of my career to worry about reputation - but a lot of public money has been wasted on that project (and the person with whom I disagreed told me a few years later, as he was retiring, that had I stayed I would have been a quarter of a million richer).