Protecting whistleblowers against discrimination in the NHS

摘要

On 20 March 2017 the Department of Health published draft regulations to give legal protection to NHS whistleblowers. The proposals were open for public consultation and closed on 9 May 2017 (Department of Health (DH), 2017a). These plans have been formulated to augment the legal steps whistleblowers can take if they seek re-employment in the NHS and believe that a potential NHS employer has discriminated against them because they are suspected of blowing the whistle in exposing aspects of poor care (DH, 2017b). Whistleblowing protection is not just an NHS issue and other sections of the economy are equally at risk, as revealed recently when the chief executive of Barclays bank attempted to track down with extreme prejudice the employee who was the author of anonymous whistleblowing letters to his organisation (Kollewe and Ruddick,2017). The Government's plans to protect whistleblowers are timely, given that a recent Royal College of Physicians (RCP) survey found that, of 2100 doctors who responded, only 47% believed that doctors in their trusts were confident about 'speaking up' without fear of retribution (RCP, 2017).