Consultant exposes failings at Great Ormond Street Hospital

December 7, 2009 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News

A consultant from the infamous Baby P clinic has broken her silence ahead of an NHS London report, exposing how Great Ormond Street tried to buy her silence.

Dr. Kim Holt, former consultant for the pediatric clinic at St Ann’s Hospital, Haringey, has told The Sunday Telegraph that Great Ormond Street Hospital staff offered her 120,000 pounds to walk away from her job and remain silent to what she observed at the clinic.

In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan, Dr. Holt explained that in early 2006, after witnessing numerous issues that threatened the wellbeing of the clinic’s patients, Dr. Sukanta Banerjee, Dr. Haitham el-Bashir, Dr. Sethu Wariyar and she sent a “strong” letter to management. The letter, which can be found here, detailed key issues with the clinic and ranked them by level of risk to patients.

Dr. Holt told The Sunday Telegraph: “That letter is extremely strong. It was very unusual for four consultants to write like that. We only did it because we were at our wits’ end. We had a professional and moral obligation to raise our concerns. The children had no one else to speak up for them except us and we felt passionately that we were letting them down.”

“The response of management was hostile and bullying,” she added. “One manager threatened me with the sack.”

Additionally, management cut the permanent consultant staff down from four to three, despite dire warning that more staff was desperately needed.

After the death of Baby P, it was found that the clinic needed nine permanent consultants to offer a quality level of care. Yet the hospital made a strong effort to keep Dr. Holt quiet. They offered her 120,000 pounds and told her to keep any allegations of wrongdoing to herself.

“They said I had to withdraw my allegations or the money was off the table,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “They wanted me to sign a statement saying that all my concerns had been addressed. I refused because it would have been a lie. They were trying to buy my silence.”

Andrew Gilligan, the Telegraph’s London editor, posted in his personal column today an analysis of Great Ormond Street’s reaction to Dr. Holt’s allegations.

“Great Ormond Street has issued a statement saying that it does not accept Dr Holt’s version of events,” said Gilligan. “But the hospital’s statement casts far greater doubt on its own credibility than on hers.”

Gilligan continued, stating as untrue the allegations that Dr. Holt was offered money before concerns were raised about the clinic’s ability to provide quality care.

Gilligan wrote, “As documents I’ve seen prove, the offer of money (initially a year’s salary, later rising to £120,000) was first made in November 2007 - eighteen months after Dr Holt and her three colleagues raised concerns about child protection, in writing, to their senior managers, Jane Elias (from NHS Haringey) and David Elliman (from Great Ormond Street).”

The NHS London is set to release a report on December 8 regarding Dr. Holt’s allegations. Claiming to have a “leaked copy of the report”, Gilligan said that “it is far more favorable to Dr Holt’s version of events than to Great Ormond Street’s.”

Regarding the report, Dr. Holt told The Sunday Telegraph: “I have signed a confidentiality agreement… and I am not allowed to talk about what it contains, but I can say what it does not contain.”

“I do not believe the report properly addresses the key issue at the heart of what went wrong, namely staffing. Great Ormond Street will say that they have made changes now, but the fact is that a child had to die before they did so.”

Whatever the fallout from Dr. Holt’s allegations, it is certainly clear that the drama surrounding Great Ormond Street and the Baby P case is far from over.