Nursing continues to produce courageous whistleblowers, such as Terry Bryan, who helped expose the Winterbourne View scandal and Helene Donnelly, who tried to sound the alarm about care standards at Stafford hospital. But the most famous was, and remains, Graham Pink.
It was in 1990 that Pink – "Mr Pink" to friend and foe alike – touched a national nerve with his principled stand over staffing levels on the elderly care wards where he worked at Stepping Hill hospital, Stockport. His letters to everyone from his immediate managers to the prime minister, setting out in meticulous detail the harsh realities of life on the wards, made compelling, if deeply uncomfortable, reading.
Pink never sought the limelight. Already 60, he had returned to nursing after a second career as a teacher and he was driven, as he explains now, by the knowledge that the men and women living out their last days on his wards had been through the horrors of the second world war and "deserved the best". With typically just one qualified nurse and two healthcare assistants looking after 23 highly dependent patients, they were plainly not getting it.
I was privileged to play a small part in the affair. Andrew Bennett, one of Pink's local MPs, sent me a dossier of the correspondence and, with Pink's reluctant consent, we printed lengthy extracts in Society Guardian. The response was overwhelming: in those pre-email days, our postbags bulged and the phones rang off the hook. Pink himself was eventually to receive some 4,000 letters from well-wishers.
The rest was all too predictable. Found by his employer to have breached confidentiality, among other minor charges, Pink refused to accept a transfer to community health services and was dismissed. Two years later, he received maximum compensation – the dismissal had been "technically wrong" because he had not first been handed a formal warning.
The whole story is set out by Pink, now a remarkably sprightly 83, in his new book, A Time To Speak. The book has extraordinary resonance for current debate both about care of older people and about the protection of whistleblowers – a term still considered "inelegant" by Pink. "To my mind," he says, "truth-telling is more accurate and straightforward."
His truth-telling, and his subsequent treatment, did play a key part in building the pressure that led to the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, designed to protect whistleblowers. But, as a report of the Whistleblowing Commission argues, more needs to be done to ensure that they are listened to and that they do not suffer recriminations.
The commission, set up by the charity Public Concern at Work, has looked at whistleblowing in public and private sectors, and concludes that it plays a "vital" role. But, it says, people remain unwilling to speak up for fear of reprisal, many are unaware of whistleblowing policies at their workplace and, as a result, "many of the disasters and scandals which have caused so much harm and distress could have been avoided".
What is needed, the commission says, is a government code of practice on whistleblowing, to be taken into account by courts, tribunals and regulators, plus specific measures against blacklisting of workers who speak out and stronger anti-gagging provisions in law.
All this makes good sense: while we should never forget that whistleblowers are not always right, they deserve to be heard without threat of sanction. But we could do one more thing to encourage a climate of greater openness. The health authority that employed and sacked Pink may no longer exist, but its successor bodies do. How better could today's NHS demonstrate its newfound support for whistleblowing than by issuing a formal pardon to Mr Pink?
David Brindle is the Guardian's public services editor.
A Time to Speak, RCN Publishing, price £14.99
