Before Sharmila Chowdhury leaves her house each day, she puts on her wig and make-up. The ravages of her chemotherapy, however, are among the least of the radiographer’s worries.

For 27 years she worked her way up through the NHS in London, rising to become the manager of the imaging services department at Ealing Hospital NHS Trust. She was liked and respected and happy in her work.

Then the day came when she noticed that something was allegedly wrong in some of her colleagues’ timesheets. In 2007 she claimed that two doctors had been claiming for shifts at Ealing while they were moonlighting at a private hospital in Harrow.

It was then alleged that the trust had lost £250,000 of public money through similar arrangements.

She complained, but nothing happened at first. Then she walked into the nightmare world of the NHS whistleblower.

After a series of fraud claims against her that were never proven, she was suspended and marched out of the building in front of her staff. She won the subsequent interim relief tribunal in 2010, but the trust would not take her back. “Despite winning a hearing in which I was proven to be a whistleblower, I’ve no job and no money,” she said.

Last July Mrs Chowdhury, 54, went into a clinic for a routine scan and it was found she had breast cancer that had spread to her lungs. She said that a number of consultants had told her it was likely to be linked to the stress caused by the struggle over her job.

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said. “You just have to do the best. I still wear my make-up and my friends don’t realise I’m suffering, they don’t know at all.”

Mrs Chowdhury, a widow, now stands to lose her house at the end of a tree-lined terrace in west London. For several years she has barely been able to keep up with the interest payments on her mortgage and now, as the last of her savings drain out of her account, she is worried that even these may prove too much. She is also looking after her 23-year-old son, who is a student.

She has applied for several posts in the health service since leaving Ealing. Sometimes she succeeds, even after telling her interviewer that she is a whistleblower. Then her papers arrive at HR and the jobs melt away.

Once she tried for a position as a locum, a job for which she was outstandingly overqualified. She was offered an interview and then on the morning she was due to go in, she had a phone call to say it was cancelled. “I think I was blacklisted,” she said. “At one interview I said I was a whistleblower and they said that was fine. I had a job offer in writing. It was when I got to HR that there was a problem. We’ve all found the same. It’s not the clinical staff’s fault.”

In the course of her battle against the trust, Mrs Chowdhury has incurred more than £130,000 in legal fees. The judge in her employment tribunal ordered her former managers to reinstate her full salary for two years, but that was two years ago.

She has a wish list for Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary. First is an independent and public investigation into her case and the concerns she raised. Second is a job, or if not a job then a secure income and pension contributions until she retires.

She has called for a public inquiry into NHS whistleblowing and for the senior managers who hound their staff out for raising concerns to become accountable.

If possible, she wants other whistleblowers to be found jobs of the same standing — and if not, then for them to be paid until they retire.

Mrs Chowdhury is in regular contact with one of Mr Hunt’s special advisers and is optimistic that her concerns will be heard. Then again, she is optimistic about most things in her life.

Angie Bray, Mrs Chowdhury’s MP, said that she and others in her situation needed an avenue to justice.

“I think that Sharmila deserves all the support she can get,” she said.

“I would agree with re-examining cases where the individual involved in dealing with the whistleblower unsatisfactorily continues to be in authority in the NHS, and in short those who fail to address concerns raised by whistleblowers, who are continuing to work within the NHS, should face further questions.

“I do believe that [whistleblowers] do need serious attention given to this. If you want to encourage more openness and honesty, we’re going to have to make sure that we give them a proper support.”

NHS whistleblowers demand justice

Oliver Moody May 6 2014

Pressure is mounting on the NHS to reopen the cases of six of its most famous whistleblowers after they called for a judge-led public inquiry.

After a string of critical reports by MPs, the whistleblowers have written to a senior official at the Department of Health to ask for fresh investigations and compensation in what would be a series of landmark reviews.

The six are hopeful that Simon Stevens, the new head of the NHS, will radically change how the health service handles serious complaints from its staff in future. Last week he agreed to meet Raj Mattu, a heart doctor who won a 12-year battle to clear his name after going public with concerns about overcrowding on his wards.

Dr Mattu’s victory last month in an employment tribunal, one of the first of its kind, has lent impetus to others campaigning for restitution after losing their jobs in their battles with the NHS.

The six, led by David Drew, a paediatrician whose 37-year career was ruined after he voiced concerns about bullying and staff shortages, have written to Charlie Massey, a senior official in the health department. “We have all suffered employment, reputational and financial loss,” they wrote. “Some of us have had health problems and we have all endured severe stress. We would like our cases investigated and remedied at the earliest opportunity.”

The whistleblowers also called for a judicial public inquiry into the obstacles they had faced. Dr Drew has won the support of Andrew Mitchell, the MP for Sutton Coldfield and former chief whip, who has written to Dr Massey to call for the cases to be re-opened.

Another signatory, Sharmila Chowdhury, lost her job as a radiology manager at the Ealing hospitals NHS trust after complaining that consultants were taking tens of thousands of pounds in personal payments for ultrasound scans. She said that she would have to sell her house as a result of her battle against the trust.

“I have lost my career, my pension, and [am] about to lose my home,” she said. “I also now have cancer, which numerous consultants believe is due to the stress of whistleblowing.”

Ms Chowdhury, a widow struggling to support her son, said that she wanted all whistleblowers to be paid by the NHS until they retired if they had been forced out of their jobs. Last month she met a special adviser to Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, to suggest reforms but has yet to hear back.

The other signatories to the letter include Narinder Kapur, a neuropsychologist who went on a hunger strike after being unfairly dismissed by Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.

Dr Massey replied to say that although he could not yet make a decision about their “far-reaching” questions, their call for a fresh round of investigations was being considered “very carefully indeed”.

Dr Drew said that it was “no response at all”. He added: “The government and department of health have no answer to the large number of other whistleblowers who have been defeated by employment law and left to rot. The DoH has no interest in getting justice for frontline staff who have done the right thing [or] to learn the lessons of our cases.

Cleared doctor to tell NHS chief of war against him

The new head of the NHS is to meet one of the country’s most prominent whistleblowers who has won a decade-long fight to clear his name.

Raj Mattu, one of Britain’s leading heart doctors before he was suspended by his NHS trust after raising concerns about deaths on his ward, was found to have been unfairly dismissed in a landmark employment tribunal last week.

His case became a cause célèbre after officials at the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust fought a 12-year legal and public relations battle to gag him at a reported cost of between £6 million and £10 million.

Dr Mattu, 54, said that Simon Stevens, who became the chief executive of NHS England earlier this month and pledged radical, patient-centred reforms, has arranged to meet him to discuss the way the health service handles whistleblowing.

He said that he would show Mr Stevens how NHS officials tried to squash dissent, and that he would press for a panel of whistleblowers to be consulted about any changes to the system.

“It’s time the NHS senior executives found out what the relatively senior managers do,” Dr Mattu said. “They are faced with a situation where they can embrace my concerns and we can work together to solve it, or [they are] so concerned about their own position that they try to discredit me.”

He accused NHS officials of compiling dossiers of allegations against whistleblowers so their claims would be lost at an employment tribunal, and said neither he nor the nurses who raised complaints about overcrowding in the Walsgrave Hospital, Coventry, had ever been interviewed about it.

It has also emerged that Sir David Nicholson, the previous head of NHS England, dismissed concerns about Dr Mattu’s whistleblowing as an “employment matter” in 2010.

In a letter seen by The Times, Sir David wrote to another NHS whistleblower in the West Midlands, Dr Rita Pal, saying that the Department of Health would not intervene. “While I note the concerns you have expressed, this is an employment matter between Dr Mattu and the University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, and as such it would not be appropriate for the department to comment or become involved,” he wrote.

A spokesman for NHS England said: “On his very first day as NHS England chief executive three weeks ago, Simon Stevens called for a new culture of openness in the NHS, and argued that whistleblowers sometimes save patients’ lives by courageously speaking out. Since then he has continued to meet with and listen to patients, carers and frontline NHS staff, and has asked to meet Dr Mattu in the near future.”

Dr Mattu has also approached Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, for a meeting, but has yet to receive a reply.

The cardiologist said that his career had been “destroyed” after he moved from a research post in London to work in Coventry, his home town.

Before the move, he had published a much-cited article on a genetic trait among people in Caerphilly that reduced the risk of heart disease by more than a quarter.

In December 1999 he warned staff at the Walsgrave Hospital in Coventry that a policy of putting five heart patients in four-bed bays had prevented essential equipment being used to save the life of a 35-year-old man.

He made his worries public in 2001 after the trust’s chief executive told the media that the policy was not causing unnecessary deaths, and he was suspended six months later.

The trust brought more than 200 allegations against him, including bullying, fraud and sexual impropriety, all of which were dismissed by the General Medical Council. Friends of the heart doctor said the trust had also hired a PR team and private detectives in their campaign against his reinstatement.

He was restored to his job in 2010, but dismissed a year later while being treated for a debilitating auto-immune disease affecting his liver and lungs.

After the ruling that Dr Mattu had been unfairly dismissed last week, the trust said in a statement that it would “continue to support all our staff to raise issues of concern in our effort to provide continuous improvement in our services to patients”

NHS whistleblower wants her job back to encourage others