WHISTLE-BLOWING

By Lesley Morrison
Contact the author via the editor by e-mail at christopher.johnstone@ntlworld.com

The day after we returned from a three week holiday in Croatia and Bosnia I went to pick up Maisie, our black labrador, from the kennels. The woman who was looking after the kennels for the owner gave me a dog who was black and a Labrador. I commented on the fact that she was no longer wearing her red collar and was told that it must have been taken off. I paid and left, still mentally somewhere between Sarajevo and Split.

When I met up with my animal-besotted 12 year old, she ran over to the car shouting, “Maisie”. She got closer, stopped and said, firmly, “That’s not Maisie”. Of course it’s Maisie. Half an hour later my two daughters and assorted friends were still trying to persuade me that the beast in the kitchen was not, in fact, our beast. “Her tail’s not the right shape” The kennel’s been brushing it. “Her teeth look different” She’s been fed different food. “She had a claw missing” It’s grown back. I became rather tired of the interrogation and dispatched the dog to the garden. Then the definitive test was ordered. My elder daughter retrieved her to do the paw test and she failed. There was a categorical announcement, “It’s not Maisie”. Simultaneously with my finally accepting that this was, in fact, the case, my husband appeared from the garden asking for a word with me. “The rabbit”, or, rather, sadly, the deceased rabbit. The impostor had clearly not been trained to play with pet rabbits. I was not a popular mother, the impostor dog was lucky to escape alive (“murderer”) and I had had a salutary lesson in how, if you are tired and distracted and someone in authority tells you something authoritatively, you tend to believe them.

The dancers in a memorable performance at this year’s Edinburgh Festival powerfully depicted the dilemmas around compliance and authority. In “Joe”, first performed in Canada twenty years ago, 32 dancers dressed identically in drab overcoats march in changing formations around the stage. Individuals and small groups are determined to break away but the force of conformity is hard to resist. They get sucked back into the mass or the wave of marching feet flows over them. Finally the piece celebrates the individuality of human life and the compelling need of people to be true to themselves. Being true to yourself and breaking away from authority and the restrictions that it imposes can demand great courage. “Whistleblowing” and the cost attached to it has been very much in the public domain over the last few months. Katherine Gunn, the ex-GCHQ worker, faced jail for revealing US plans to bug UN delegates in the run-up to the war in Iraq. She went on to become a founder member, along with Daniel Ellsberg, the Vietnam war whistleblower, of the Truth-Telling Coalition set up to encourage more of their former colleagues to “speak truth to power”. The coalition and its sister organization POGO, Project on Government Oversight, facilitate support and legal back-up for government insiders contemplating “patriotic truth-telling.” Truth-telling in the medical world can also have a risk attached. Several years ago, my husband blew the whistle on a doctor for whom he was doing a locum who was inappropriately prescribing heroin to addicts. He gave evidence at a public hearing at the GMC and I waited for the police to knock at the door to tell me an addict had taken revenge for cutting off his supply.

A year ago, Audit Scotland and Public Concern at Work circulate a booklet to NHS employees, among others, “Don’t turn a blind eye….. what should you do if you suspect fraud or corruption?” It sets out the potential value of whistleblowing and describes how the Public Interest Disclosure Act provides strong protection for workers who blow the whistle on, or raise a genuine concern about, malpractice. The recent publication of the inquiries into the cases of Clifford Ayling, the GP jailed for sexually abusing his patients over thirty years and the gynaecologist Richard Neale who botched operations on women over more than a decade, demonstrates why such publicity is so necessary. They were allowed to get away with unacceptable practice for an extraordinarily long time because patients, colleagues and managers did not dare to challenge their behaviour. They were able to continue because of a culture of complacency.

Many of us are also concerned that a culture of complaint is becoming rampant in the NHS, undermining trust in doctors and other health professionals, and that more needs to be done to encourage a culture where feedback from patients, be it compliment, comment or legitimate complaint, are all encouraged. There is a fairly fine balance between enabling patients to, when necessary, complain and professionals to, when necessary, whistleblow, and creating an unhealthy environment of alienation and distrust. War on Want have just produced a fundraising leaflet for their campaign against poverty. It talks about “blowing the whistle on exploitation and injustice”. That sense of being indirectly involved in taking risky and effective action, of (from a safe distance) putting your head above the parapet, appeals to potential donors. It’s tougher when the distance is closer and the environment more familiar.

We tend to want to trust apparently benign authority. If that need threatens our confidence in our basic instincts, it can be very uncomfortable and troubling. If a nice person whom I perceived to be affable, efficient and in authority could hand me the wrong dog, did I leave the maternity unit 19 years ago with the right baby?!

If you are interested in finding out more about whistle-blowing here are some websites to get you going;

Other hoolet online articles by Lesley Morrison can be found at:
hoolet edition 49 - Review: Reflective Practice Writing and
Reflective Development
hoolet edition 49 - Enjoyable Journeys
hoolet edition 45 - Read All About It
hoolet edition 43 - Whistle-Blowing
hoolet edition 38 - Hope For Palestine?
hoolet edition 36 - Letter To The Editor
hoolet edition 32 - Letters To The Editor
hoolet edition 27 - The Bag Lady
hoolet webextra - Edinburgh Restival Review

Other hoolet reviews by Lesley Morrison:
Reflective Practice Writing and Reflective Development

hoolet is the magazine of RCGP Scotland. It is supported intellectually, financially and emotionally by RCGP Scotland.

This issue maintained by Robert Hallam.