Statement By Kelly Goulding Information Analyst St Georges Healthcare NHS Trust Submitted To The Croydon Employment Tribunal
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When I worked at St George's Healthcare NHS Trust, I produced some of the figures for the weekly Department of Health SITREP reporting using the Trust's reporting tool (Squirrel) to query PAS (Patient Administration System). These figures included Number of A&E Attendances, Number of Admissions and the Number of Cancelled Operations. I was using the standard Department of Health SITREP definitions at that time. The Cancelled Operations figures definition was basically looking at the NHS Patient Charter definition of all Elective Admissions cancelled at the last minute (last minute referred to on the day of or after admission). Normally I would email these figures to Jenny Jones (Bed Manager) who would enter them on the SITREP website together with other figures collected by the Bed Management Team.
On Tuesday 9th October 2001 Mary White (Bed Manager) came up to my desk to input the weekly SITREP figures. Jenny Jones was away that day and Mary White was not able log into the website from her computer, so came to see me and enter the figures using my computer. We entered all the figures (mine and hers) except for two, Number of Cancelled Operations (provided from me) and A&E Waiters over 4 hours (provided by the bed managers). We printed out a copy of the report from the Internet site (before we saved it but did not submit it) and wrote the figures in pencil next to the empty boxes for cancelled ops and A&E waiters over 4 hours. Mary had been instructed not to enter these figures because the Regional Office could see any figures we entered on the website even if we didn't submit the report. Mary took a copy up to John Parkes (who authorised all figures before we could submit them) to review.
John Parkes rang me on Tuesday afternoon and said that all the figures were okay to submit and that A&E waiters over 4 hours should be 204 (Mary White had a figure of 189 but I think this was estimated from a sample) and that Cancelled Operations should be 0. I told him that the figure I had obtained was 28 patients and he said that this was incorrect as all routine operations were being cancelled in advance. I replied that I did not believe that this was true and was sure that the admissions co-ordinators didn't always contact the patients until the day they were due to come in. I said that I excluded any patients that were cancelled in advance. I also said that we had 2 cancellations that were due to no theatre time and no surgeon which unlikely to have been cancelled in advance and should be reported. I mentioned that we usually have at least 5 cancelled operations and it would seem quite odd to suddenly have no cancellations. John Parkes replied that the Cancelled Operations figures were something that we were being closely monitored on at the moment and that I should enter zero against the Cancelled Operations field on the SITREP submission.
I did not feel happy about entering zero for the cancellations. I was concerned about the conversation I'd had with John Parkes so spoke to my line manager, Traci Dean and Head of Information, Wendy McCarthy. Other than confirming facts and figures with Traci Dean and Wendy McCarthy, I didn’t have any further dealing with this issue.
I continued to produce the weekly SITREP figures for the following 18 months until I left the employment of St George's Healthcare NHS Trust in March 2003 to move to a new post within the NHS.
Kelly Goulding
31/03/03