John Parkes Chief Executive West Suffolk NHS Trust Formerly St George's Healthcare Deputy Chief Executive
(See Section In Red At Bottom Of This Page For My Comments Following My Receipt Of The Sissling Internal NHS Report, Which Found That My Allegation That John Parkes deliberately and improperly altered the cancelled operations figures at St George's was well founded)
John Parkes the Deputy Chief Executive did not play any active part in my NHS Internal Disciplinary process. By the time I was asked to resign my post of Finance Director with St George's Healthcare NHS Trust he had already moved on to become Chief Executive of West Suffolk NHS Trust. Although he played no part in my disciplinary he played the central role in the cancelled operations issue which I believe was the catalyst for the Trust starting to decide they needed to get rid of me because as they say I was not a "team player". John Parkes reputation amongst the staff that worked within the Information section of my directorate was not good. He had previously managed these staff before the responsibility for managing the information function had been transferred to me. Early in 2001 I had a complaint from a senior female member of the team that when she and a female business manager had attended a meeting with Mr Parkes to talk about issues concerning the Outpatient Partial Booking system, that he had been both aggressive and confrontational and had used inappropriate obscene language during the course of what she had considered to be a very unprofessional meeting. When Wendy McCarthy reported that Kelly Goulding had complained that John Parkes had told her to alter the cancelled operations figures because of the complaint I had previously received about John Parkes, it was a matter that I took very seriously and why I reported it to the Chief Executive Ian Hamilton. In the week following my disclosure of the cancelled operations issue, John Parkes telephoned me to complain that I had backed Kelly Goulding in her reporting of the cancelled operations issue. "How can I trust you as a board colleague if I don't know what you are going to say in this kind of situation", he told me. I replied that he would always know what I was going to say in any given situation, because I was always going to tell the truth regardless of the respective seniority of the individuals concerned. The conversation ended acrimoniously, but the fact that it took place was confirmed when my secretary Janet Watson gave her evidence under oath to the Employment Tribunal. Subsequent to my raising of the cancelled operations issue, John Parkes tried to suggest that the reason why he had told Kelly Goulding to alter the cancelled operations figures was because there was some confusion about how to define a cancellation, but I clarified that the Information Directorate was using the correct definition with Aisling Bowman of the London Regional Office of the NHS and of course John Parkes only raised this issue following my disclosure and as the statement of Kelly Gouldng shows, no mention of a definition was raised when she was told to change the figures. Indeed the Trust seems to have been quite imaginative in coming up with excuses for why the numbers were altered, as when the issue first broke in the media they suggested in was nothing to do with definitions, but was because of a computer glitch. Check out what the Trust said to the Evening Standard in January 2003 , the BBC or the Guardian. This was an excuse they abandoned at the Employment Tribunal when the Trust said, that they now admitted that I had flagged the issue up correctly as a protected disclosure, but that it had been satisfactorily dealt with and it was not the reason why they had dismissed me from my post. Sir Nigel Crisp of course had said publicly that NHS managers who fiddle hospital figures will have to leave the service and will not be re-employed elsewhere. John Parkes has been promoted to the post of Chief Executive at West Suffolk NHS Trust. I leave you to decide whether you think this is a reasonable thing to have happened.
As a post script to this issue following the BBC Panoroma programme I received a letter from a firm of solicitors Capsticks that said that if I repeated those comments the West Suffolk NHS Trust would take legal action against me to protect John Parkes reputation. As I am quite sure such legal action would fail as I have done nothing but tell the truth I sent a very robust reply back to Capsticks and no action has ever been initiated against me by the West Suffolk NHS Trust. However, in my reply I asked how the West Suffolk Trust could pay for any legal action that Mr Parkes proposed taking, when the issue related to something that happened when we were both working for St George's Healthcare. I would have thought as tax payers money was involved and I have to make my own arrangements to cover my own legal costs, it was a reasonable question to ask, but as is usual with the "open" NHS they have declined to answer my question as their reply makes clear.
UPDATE: On the 12th November the London Evening Standard published an article which showed further information on the misreporting of government targets. This wrong doing was based around an e-mail that John Parkes had sent to both myself and the Chief Executive in February 2001, where in response to an e-mail from me expressing concern about the misreporting of outpatient waiting list figures he makes it crystal clear that reporting these figures is not as one would have imagined a straightforward process, but is one that has a political dimension which he is handling with the London Regional Office of the NHS . What happened at St George's was that for a period the outpatient waiting list figures were under reported. However, when the mistake was discovered, the action that John Parkes took in consultation with the London Regional Office, was not as the public should have been entitled to expect an immediate honest admission that the numbers had been understated but was instead an attempt to consider deliberately misreporting the figures over a period of time to try and ensure that no one ever became aware of the under reporting. The Evening Standard article attributes John Parkes as saying in relation to this issue, "In subsequent e-mails I made it crystal clear that neither the Trust nor I would support any return that misrepresented reality". I would simply ask anyone reading that statement to compare it with Kelly Goulding's statement of St George's Information about what John Parkes said to her in October 2001 about cancelled operations. The Wandsworth Borough News in their 14th November edition covered this story and asked John Parkes to comment on this issue, but he declined to do so.
It is probably wise that John Parkes and Capsticks did not pursue their threatened legal action regarding their claim that statements that I made on the Panorama programme fiddling the figures were untrue. On Tuesday 19th October 2004 the NHS Internal Investigation chaired by David Sissling reported and stated:-
"I consider Mr Perkin's allegations proven, in respect of the inappropriate alteration of cancelled operations data for the three weeks commencing 24 September 2001. I am also of the opinion that the Trust was wrong in offering a variety of excuses for the error occurring".
Are the NHS going to sack Mr Parkes from his job of Chief Executive for fiddling the cancelled operations, as Sir Nigel Crisp and the Secretary of State of Health have always maintained will be the case where it is found that senior NHS officials have falsely changed reported clinical data? Of course they have not. The NHS is much happier sacking "Whistle-blowers" like myself. The South West London Strategic Health Authority who have published the report, have not recommended that any action be taken in regard to Mr Parkes even though the NHS has found my allegations to be proven.