davidhencke

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Exclusive: Top executive who offered secret deal to cover up whistleblower case gets promotion to new national role in the NHS

Daniel Elkeles, moving from CEO of the London Ambulance Trust to NHS Providers. He is the former chief executive of the Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust. In May Daniel Elkeles will become the £240,000 a year chief executive of NHS Providers, a membership body that covers all hospital, mental health, ambulance and community trusts. His job as NHS Providers will be to “to deliver high-quality,…

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Department of Transport excludes over one million disabled drivers from the green car revolution

Electric car charging at home, Clean energy filling technology. Pic credit:www.freepik.com A damning report from MPs today reveals that 1.2 million disabled drivers have been blocked by the government from being able to use electric charging points cars at motorway service stations and garages. While the UK is on target to increase the number of charging points for the growing number of…

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Guest Post from Dr David Ward: Time to ban NHS trusts from sacking whistleblower doctors and health care workers

DR DAVID E WARD This blog arose from the recent case highlighted by the Health Services Journal of Dr Susan Gilby, the former chief executive of the Countess of Chester hospital in giving evidence to the Thirlwell Inquiry about the resistance from senior NHS people she faced trying to admit mistakes there. This is the hospital where a nurse Lucy Letby was found guilty of murdering seven babies…

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Top judicial body challenged by Information Commissioner to take freedom of information requests over complaints against judges

John Edwards, Information Commissioner A ground breaking decision by the Information Commissioner which would lead to the end of secrecy around the behaviour of judges will soon be tested in one of the highest tribunals in the country. For years the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, which, among other matters investigates complaints against judges, has claimed it is a private independent…

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Time to start mediation : 50s women deliver letter to PM at Downing Street

From right to left Jocelynne Scutt, former Australian judge; Ian Byrne, Labour MP for Liverpool,West Derby and myself a journalist and a patron of CEDAWinLAW. Waspi threaten further legal action and another judicial review The present impasse over whether 50swomen should receive any compensation at all after ministers refused to pay must cease. WASPI who relied on the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s…

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Exclusive: Infected Blood Compensation Authority plans to gag lawyers from publicly criticising their actions

Sir Brian Langstaff, chair of the infected blood inquiry Lawyers representing thousands of haemophiliacs who unknowingly got hepatitis, HIV and Aids from blood transfusions provided by drug addicts and criminals in the United States in one of Britain’s biggest health scandals could be gagged from publicly criticising compensation payments. A new draft contract proposed by the Infected Blood…

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Can Whitehall promote innovation, efficiency and AI technology to help overcome the crisis in providing public services?

Gareth Davies, head of the National Audit Office Head of the National Audit Office raises pertinent questions about the future direction of Whitehall in annual speech Anybody reading the latest tranche of reports from the National Audit Office and the Commons Public Accounts Committee could be forgiven for thinking the UK is living in a dystopian world. Indeed fiction writers could use their…

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Ministry slammed by auditors for not getting correct Parliamentary approval for paying out Post Office victims

Parliament’s watchdog, the National Audit Office, has qualified last year’s annual accounts of the Department for Business and Trade, for failing to providing accurate estimates of the money needed to compensate the Post Office victims of the Horizon scandal and overspending its budget by over £200m. The disclosure is the latest blunder in the handling of the scandal where hundreds of…

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My blog in 2024: Over 358,000 hits with a huge interest in pensioner issues and whistleblower injustice

Hits on my blog jumped from 219,000 in 2023 to over 358,000 last year. This will be an underestimate because it does not include thousands of additional hits on Linked In, particularly where I highlighted bad practices in employment tribunals and hideous unjust treatment of whistleblowers by NHS trusts and other state and private organisations including Sellafield and a Network Rail…

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The tragic death of a talented and hard working ITV news editor and the dramatic inquest that fell short of providing answers

Teresa McMahon Pic credit Linked In Coroner Mary Hassell now facing bereaved members of two families unhappy about the way she conducts inquests Teresa McMahon was a well liked news editor for ITV’s Granada Reports who had a first class honours degree in journalism and was based in Salford. From humble beginnings she was rated by colleagues as ” a highly competent news editor, who had worked on…

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Jocelynne Scutt leads charge for CEDAWinLAW at APPG on 50s women pensions

Jocelynne Scutt The All Party Parliamentary Group on 50swomen pensions finally heard from CEDAWinLaw about what they want to see the Government do about responding to compensation for the 50s women deprived of their pensions for six years. Until this month the only organisation allowed to approach the group were WASPI and their lobbyists Higgerson Strategy. The meeting was in private. An…

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How Claire McLaughlan got promoted to review Lucy Letby in 2016 two years after the NHS was told she had to apologise for distorting whistleblower Dr Chris Day views in a major health trust investigation

Claire McLaughlan Her role in the Lucy Letby case comes out in a savage cross examination at the Thirlwall inquiry Claire McLaughlan may not be nationally known but has great influence in the NHS. She has become the “go to” person when health trusts want to deal with what they see as troublesome doctors raising inconvenient issues such as patient safety and helping trusts to discredit…

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Trump re-election leads to Americans to flee their country for Europe and the UK

Donald Trump; Pic Credit: The Trump Organisation website Donald Trump plans the biggest deportation of illegals ever seen in American history – accusing them of being criminals, mentally unstable, drug dealers and even eating people’s pets. But like every political policy there are always unintended consequences. And one of them has been building up since 2020 ever since the notorious storming…

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Sexual harassment at work to be treated as a whistleblower complaint under new employment law

But no answers from the ministry on plans to cost and scope the establishment of an Office of the Whistleblower The Department for Business and Trade is changing the law to strengthen the right of people to report sexual harassment at work by making it a protective disclosure under whistleblowing legislation. Bizarrely this measure was missed by mainstream media when the bill was published last…

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Judge reserves judgement on whether a top legal firm should pay wasted costs for hiding documents that removed 54,000 English doctors from the UK's legal whistleblowing protection in the Public Interest Disclosure Act

Dr Chris Day The latest in the long saga of employment tribunal hearings involving whistleblower doctor Chris Day and his ten year fight for justice over patient safety following the avoidable deaths of two patients in the intensive care unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich ended with a judge reserving her decision. This particular hearing concerned the role of top NHS lawyers Hill…

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Social Security watchdog warns ministers of flaws in the scheme to scrap pensioner winter fuel allowances

Department for Work and Pensions In a polite but tough message to Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, the Government’s official advisory body on social security, has exposed flaws in the government’s implementation of its rushed policy to abolish winter fuel allowances for 9.3 million pensioners and encourage the poorest to claim pension credit. It also undermines the government’s…

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How a leading teaching hospital and a coroner failed a young woman who was brain dead 17 hours after being admitted to A & E

Gaia Young Case for a new inquest after coroner Mary Hassell failed to find adequate explanation for her death This is an extremely tragic tale of what happened when a 25 year old healthy and talented woman, Gaia Young, was rushed to accident and emergency with severe headaches only to die of an unexplained brain condition and doctors have yet to correctly diagnose what was wrong with her. The…