A powerful group of MPs has invited a hospital boss-turned-whistleblower to provide evidence about his claims that senior NHS figures ignored his warnings that his hospital was set to become "the next Mid-Staffordshire".
The Commons health select committee will invite Gary Walker, who was sacked as chief executive of the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS trust (ULHT) in 2010, to outline events leading up to his departure.
Walker claims Sir David Nicholson, the NHS's overall chief executive, ignored him when he sounded the alarm about high death rates at his trust. Walker accused him of bowing to pressure to meet government-imposed targets and said Nicholson was "not interested in patient safety".
The trust is now one of 14 being investigated by the NHS's medical director, Professor Bruce Keogh, over high death rates that may be linked to poor care. Those investigations follow last week's publication of Robert Francis QC's damning report into the Mid-Staffordshire scandal, which claimed between 400 and 1,200 lives from 2005 to 2009.
Walker spoke publicly on Thursday about his time at the trust despite being subject to a legal ban preventing him from discussing it, which was part of the compromise agreement he reached with it in 2011.
"I want David Nicholson to be held to account. I warned him this was going to happen. I warned him that Lincolnshire was going to become the next Mid-Staffordshire. He didn't investigate those concerns and now look what's happened," Walker said.
Walker said his trust came under such heavy pressure from soaring demand for treatment that he wanted to abandon the NHS-wide target that patients arriving in A&E should be treated within four hours. He claims that was overruled by Dame Barbara Hakin, the then head of the NHS's East Midlands strategic health authority (SHA) who is now a senior figure in the new NHS commissioning board, of which Nicholson will be chief executive.
Stephen Dorrell, the former health secretary who chairs the committee, wrote to the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, on Thursday night telling him that MPs on it would like to hear Walker's account. Dorrell said Walker's exit from the trust was another example of the NHS's "unacceptable" use of gagging clauses on ex-employees.
"The committee intends to write to Mr Walker to invite him to set out in detail the nature of the concerns which lay behind the breakdown of his relationship with the Lincolnshire trust", Dorrell wrote. Before doing so, though, he asked Hunt to confirm that no NHS body would seek to enforce the confidentiality clause.
The SHA totally rejected Walker's claims. "The East Midlands SHA totally refutes all the allegations made by Gary Walker and his account of the specific conversations with Dame Barbara Hakin, the then-SHA chief executive", said a spokeswoman. "During her tenure as SHA chief executive Dame Barbara acted at all times in the interests of patients, ensured they received high quality and safe services."
The SHA was so concerned about the Lincolnshire trust's performance on issues such as cancer patients waiting too long for treatment and patients acquiring C.difficile, that it began investigating it in 2009, she added. That found "a lack of strategic direction at the trust and that clinical governance arrangements were weak", she added.
Nicholson did not respond to Walker's comments. But the Department of Health (DH) said they were baseless.
"In 2009, Sir David commissioned an independent review to look at Gary Walker's claims of bullying and harassment by East Midlands SHA. Allegations of this nature are taken extremely seriously. The review concluded there was no evidence whatsoever to back his claims and a summary of the review's findings and Sir David's response has been published publicly," a DH spokesman said.
"Following concerns about the trust in 2009, Dame Catherine Elcoat, the SHA's director of nursing carried out a full review into the quality of services. The review concluded there were no immediate concerns in respect of either patient safety or experience."
