Whistleblowing and Healthcare

Access our resources and opinion articles on this topic:

RTE Brainstorm (2020): Who’s going to speak up for Irish healthcare staff? (op-ed)

The Conversation (2020): Coronavirus shows the dangers of letting market forces govern health and social care. (op-ed with Prof M Fotaki)

RTE Brainstorm (2020): Can organizations be kept honest during the pandemic? (op-ed)

Centre for Health and the Public Interest [UK] (2020) Healthcare staff struggled to speak out long before COVID-19. They need help to do so now  (op-ed with Prof M Fotaki)

We need to protect the whistleblowers who save our skins but pay the price

by Kate Kenny, 

The recent Francis Report into how poor care at Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust was allowed to happen, was another lesson in just how valuable whistleblowers are to society. And yet as a society, we don’t seem to care that many struggle to survive.

Whistleblowers perform a vital role in today’s world. They alert the public to financial fraud, abuse in institutions and potential environmental disasters. For years, the NHS ignored attempts by whistleblowers to raise concerns about care that was “substandard, and sometimes unsafe”, while we now know that the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 could have been prevented had BP listened to just one of the many warnings coming from whistleblowers inside the company.

Read the full article on The Conversation

On compassion, markets and ethics of care

by Marianna Fotaki

‘Compassionate care must be at the centre of everything the NHS does’ proclaims the Government’s response to the Francis Report on the failures of care in the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust. Amongst many sensible recommendations, the most catchy and impressive is the one requiring ‘96% of senior leaders and all ministers at the Department of Health to have gained frontline experience in health and social care settings by the end of the year’

Read more