Diane Mark St George's Healthcare NHS Trust Non-Executive Director
Diane Mark sat on my internal NHS disciplinary according to Chairman Catherine McLouglin in the capacity of "A Sounding Board". As a panel member Diane Marks gave no evidence, but she submitted a statement and gave evidence to my Employment Tribunal hearing. In that evidence Diane Marks claimed that concern had been expressed by the St George's Service Centre Chairs (the lead clinicians) about the Finance Directorate's lack of engagement and communication on costing and pricing and the need for greater transparency to enable fully informed decisions being made. She went on to say that this was a view supported by a consensus of the General Mangers and senior clinicians and that they did not feel supported by the finance department. No evidence was submitted at all at my internal hearing to support Miss Mark taking this view. The only General Manager called by the Trust to give evidence at the internal hearing was Suzie Bailey and her evidence was clearly contradicted by another General Manager Mike Cumberbatch, which shows that at the least, Miss Mark was being completely disingenuous when she suggested that there was a consensus among the General Managers. The evidence that was presented at the hearing showed clearly that there was no consensus. As regards the suggestion that there was a similar consensus amongst senior clinicians, the evidence for this claim is even weaker, again showing that Miss Mark had been prepared to ignore the submitted evidence at the NHS internal hearing in order to try and support Miss Mcloughlin in her attempts to unfairly dismiss me from my employment. Not a single Service Centre Chair was called to give evidence at my internal hearing, in fact the only evidence submitted at my internal hearing by any of the Service Centre Chairmen was a statement, that I obtained from Mike Bailey the Chairman of the Surgical Service Centre, where he made it quite clear that although the Service Centre Chairmen were concerned about the lack of involvement in the financial process, they did not seek to attribute blame for this and acknowledged that their understanding was such that it would have been inappropriate for them to have done so. As this is the only evidence that was submitted I find it extremely difficult to believe that Miss Mark can have drawn the conclusion that she did, unless of course she had an ulterior motive for ignoring the actual evidence, in that she wished to assist Miss Mcloughlin in coming to a predetermined judgement about me.
Miss Mark’s conclusions are all the more difficult to understand when put in the context of the other evidence I submitted which showed that far from being reluctant to engage with staff, I was the only Board Director to have an advertised seminar , where any member of staff could come along during a lunch time if they had any concerns about the financing of either St George’s or the NHS in general and ask me any questions at all. I was also prepared to hold my seminar at any hospital in the group as demonstrated in the e-mail , which I sent to Philip Sargeaunt. In addition my letter to the Chairman of the Children & Women’s Services Patricia Hamilton demonstrates that there was no reluctance at all on my part to respond to information requests from senior clinicians and the e-mails from my Income Controller Ian Harris to the General Managers again show that there was absolutely no reluctance to provide them with information either. In her witness statement submitted to the Employment Tribunal Diane Marks stated in relation to my claims that I had been sacked for flagging up the cancelled operations issue and the financial balance issue, “The alleged disclosures did not form part of our discussions and were not the reasons why she (Miss Mcloughlin) took the decision to dismiss”. This is a most extraordinary admission for a member of the disciplinary panel to have made, given that the final page of my dismissal letter from Miss Mcloughlin states that, “we entirely reject the contention put forward on your behalf by Mr Quill that the disciplinary proceedings were brought to penalise you for expressing your views about the Trust’s financial affairs, about concerns raised by you over statistics relating to cancelled operations”. According to Miss Mark's written evidence, this rejection of my defence was clearly done without it forming any part of their discussions at all, clearly indicating that the hearing was neither fair nor impartial, if my evidence was to be so easily disregarded with no discussion. In fact when Diane Mark gave her evidence to the Employment Tribunal she made the statement that in her view there had not been any deliberate manipulation of figures. She told the tribunal: "Once the issue was raised by Mr Perkin, executives went through the figures and it was dealt with within days. "It was confusion over the definition of cancelled operations which led to the situation. Mr Perkin's definition proved to be the correct one and once that was determined it was resolved." However, when she was then quizzed over the allegation that Mr Parkes had told Kelly Goulding to change the figure "because it is something we are being closely monitored on at the moment", she admitted that no investigation had been carried out into the allegation. A truly astonishing admission. It is clear that the consideration of the evidence submitted at my internal disciplinary hearing was not properly considered by Miss Marks as I always feared would be the case if Miss Mcloughlin chaired the hearing and Miss Marks own written statement confirms that this was indeed the case. A properly constituted independently chaired disciplinary hearing would have carefully weighed the arguments being put forward by both parties and then would have given their reasons for dismissing the arguments that they felt were not valid. As Miss Marks clearly states in her witness statement, under Miss McLoughlin’s chairmanship my evidence about the alleged disclosures did not form any part of their discussions at all.
Much play was made of the fact by the Trust's barrister Simon Devonshire at the Employment Tribunal that Diane Mark is a magistrate, implying that more weight should therefore be given to her evidence. After the way she behaved in the conduct of my case I leave you to decide if you would be happy appearing in court and knowing that Diane Mark was going to sit in judgement on you. As Diane Mark said under oath at the Employment Tribunal about me, "We did not reach any conclusions about what he had done or when, we just decided he had done something". Bit of a worrying conclusion for an experienced magistrate to reach don't you think?