Professor Paul Jones
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Professor Paul Jones the Trust’s Medical Director, when he gave his evidence at my internal NHS hearing, agreed, that he had never raised with me either formally or informally any of the issues of concern which he claimed to have had with my “management style” as Finance Director. Indeed under questioning Professor Jones further agreed that his failure to have raised any of these concerns with me could be seen as a weakness and a failure on his part and he accepted that he should probably with hindsight have done so. As a senior member of the Board Professor Jones was copied in on the exchange of e-mails regarding the protected disclosure of the misreporting of the cancelled operations figures in October 2001 and was present at the meeting of Executive Directors held on the Saturday 13th October 2004 when the issue was discussed. Again as the Management Statement of Case confirms, it was in October 2001, that Professor Jones first raised concerns about my management style with the Chief Executive. Again I do not think these two events are unrelated, given that at that time I had been Finance Director for eleven years and Professor Jones had been Medical Director for three years and there is no evidence of any complaint of any kind having been made about me by him to anyone before that time. I think his concerns arose directly from my having made a protected disclosure about the cancelled operations, however to try and justify his criticism of me, Professor Jones suggested in the second paragraph of his statement that he submitted to my Internal Disciplinary Hearing that the Finance Department had, “proved to be almost totally obstructive to the requests from managers and clinicians for financial information that will enable them to make the best service development decisions”. Professor Jones did not of course give a single example of where my staff had not fulfilled a request for financial information and as Phillip Sargeaunt St George's Chief Management Accountant said in the statement that he submitted to the Employment Tribunal, “It is frankly absurd to suggest that they would be deliberately obstructive and I would refute this statement 100%”. Why would Professor Jones make such a clearly absurd statement? He did so because his real intention was to try and punish me for having raised the issue of the cancelled operations. Professor Jones in giving his evidence also made the equally absurd statement that when he had worked at St Helier Hospital some eleven years before, the finance department there had been much better run. In response to this criticism I pointed out to Professor Jones that St Helier Hospital eleven years ago had been a non-teaching hospital of less than half the size and complexity of St George’s and that in any event two years ago the Commission of Health Improvement (CHI) had said, “The management of the St Helier Trust is defensive in its attitude and staff morale is low as communication systems between the executive team and staff are weak”. The rating given to St Helier by CHI was “nil” which culminated in the resignation of the Chief Executive and the removal of the Finance Director as Deputy Chief Executive. In reply Professor Jones said that the reason that St Helier had run into problems was because they had merged with Epsom NHS Trust and that it was a well known fact that when two hospitals merged they always ran into financial difficulties. When I explained that about twelve years ago I had handled the financial arrangements relating to the merger of St James Hospital and St Georges Hospital and not only had I not made a loss in doing this, but had managed to contribute three million pounds of recurring savings for the benefit of the wider NHS, Professor Jones said that the NHS was much more complex now and a comparison over that period of time was invalid. Therefore according to Professor Jones evidence, a comparison of finance departments over a period of eleven to twelve years is valid if in his opinion the comparison is detrimental to me, but not valid if it is favourable to me. The other incredible and completely false accusation that Professor Jones made in his written statement was that in relation to giving clinicians and managers information about the costing of clinical services, every request for information and support in this area from the Finance Directorate had been met with a flat refusal to consider or even understand the position that management teams found themselves in, although he could produce not one e-mail or letter from anyone that said there was an outstanding request for information or support that my directorate had not fulfilled. This statement by Professor Jones ignores completely the e-mails sent out by Ian Harris the Finance Directorates Income Controller explaining the costing process, ignores the presentation I gave on the subject to the Special Board Meeting held on the 5th July and also ignores the reply I sent to Patricia Hamilton the Chairman of Women’s & Children’s Services, copies of which I presented to the disciplinary hearing and which demonstrates a detailed response to a request for information to help her answer the concerns of clinicians on how costs are calculated in respect of the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit. Far from being a refusal to cooperate with clinicians and managers this e-mail shows Professor Jones allegations to be entirely false, particularly as the final sentence of my reply says, “ I hope the above explains the situation, but should you have any further queries please do let me know”. Professor Jones also made other equally untrue allegations about me. In his statement he said I exhibited a sense of “won’t do”, completely ignoring the long list of my achievements at St George’s which I presented to the hearing and which included having presented to the Executive Group in August 1994, a proposal for building and funding a new state of the art Neuro-Cardiac Unit at a value in excess of £50million. This is the biggest ever single capital development to have taken place on the St George’s site and the new Atkinson Morley’s Wing is opened in the autumn of 2003 to huge acclaim. Other achievements include the appointment last year of St George’s as a pilot site for the development of the NHS Electronic Staff Record Project, one of the biggest computer developments ever undertaken in the United Kingdom. Running probably the most successful accountants training programme in the whole of the NHS, which has produced a large number of accountants for not only St George’s but also the wider NHS. The winning in 2002 of the contracts to provide Internal Audit Services to all the local NHS Primary Care Trusts, which the Chairman of the Trust Miss Mcloughlin said she wished to praise publicly at the May 2002 Trust Public Board Meeting. The gaining of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy Best Practice Employer Award in February 2002. Taking over the management of the Trust’s Procurement function in December 1999 from the Trust’s Director of Estates and the management of the Information and Computing functions from the Deputy Chief Executive in January 2001, the statements from David Boakes Head of the Trust’s Computing Function and Wendy McCarthy Head of the Trust’s Information Function giving a flavour of the work I had to undertake to provide the Trust with an effective Information and Computing service. These additional duties being taken on in addition to my role as Finance Director without any additional payment being made to me. My Directorate was also listed in Hansard as having incurred the lowest PFI external financial costs of any NHS scheme in the country, when all the other schemes listed had run up bills of millions of pounds, but St George’s had only spent £181,000 on a capital scheme with a total value in excess of £50million. In addition I managed in 2001/02 the purchase and implementation of a new state of the art local area computer network that has allowed the introduction of a Trust Intranet, praised by Professor Jones at the Trust’s 2002 Annual General Meeting for its impact on Clinical Governance, which will also give the Trust the capacity to transmit electronic images of clinical quality that will in due course replace traditional silver-nitrate x-ray images. This was the fourth largest network that the supplying company had ever installed anywhere and Miss Mcloughlin attended a photo-shoot with the company to celebrate this success in January 2002. The Trust Board Minutes for the meeting held on the 21st May 2002 (only two months before my suspension) state that in relation to the Financial Benchmarking paper that I presented which explained why St George's is incorrectly being given a poor efficiency ranking by the NHS and explains why I commissioned CHKS a leading company in the area of relating financial and activity data in the health sector to independently verify that this is the case, “The Director of Finance was thanked for commissioning this important piece of work.” I have also three times in the past five years been elected by my peers to serve on the Council of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy as one of the NHS’s representatives. My most recent successes were preventing the Trust from having to save in the 2001/02 financial year £529,000 by coming up with an accounting methodology for dealing with a prior year adjustment and recommending to the Board at the start of 2002 that the Trust take legal action against the nursing agency BNA for breach of contract, which resulted in December 2002 in the Trust receiving an out of court settlement that has brought a benefit to the Trust’s revenue account in the current financial year of over £600,000. There are other achievements that I could list, but I think all of this clearly demonstrates that my record of achievement at St George’s is at least equal to that of any other Finance Director in the NHS and certainly compares favourably with the records of any of my former board colleagues. If my list of achievements is according to Professor Jones indicative of a “Won’t do” attitude I would be interested to know exactly how much more he would have expected me to achieve in order for them to categorise me as a “Will do” person.
Of course Professor Jones track record for making unfounded comments about senior members of the Trust staff extend further than just me. In October 2002 Professor Jones gave press and television interviews which received wide coverage in the media in which he made defamatory comments about Geeta Nargund the Medical Director of St George's Princess of Wales Centre for Reproductive Medicine. After Mrs Nargund initiated legal action for defamation against St George's, the Trust issued a public apology in the High Court for the comments made by Professor Jones and paid Mrs Nargund an undisclosed sum in damages. The BBC London television report on Mrs Nargund's case can be viewed if you have Real Player on your computer by clicking on the picture of Mrs Nargund. In addition you can review some of the press coverage that the issue had at the time the Trust had to make their High Court apology.
Consultant's libel win after IVF error - Guardian 20th June
Trust's libel wins doctor damages - Hospital Doctor 26th June
Hospital apologises for remarks following after IVF mix-up - BMJ 28th June
At the St George's Public Board Meeting held in October 2003 Professor Stuart Stanton asked Professor Jones whether in view of his statements in regard to Mrs Nargund he was prepared to consider his position as Medical Director of the Trust. Miss McLoughlin the Chairman refused to allow him to answer the question. I leave you to decide whether or not in the light of the evidence Professor Paul Jones in fact has any personal integrity at all.
Low morale at hospital claims former doctor
Despite the false accusations made against Mrs Nargund and her continued suspension well after St George's made it's High Court apology, there is a happy ending to this story, in that in January 2004, seven months after the Court hearing, the Trust has welcomed her back to work. The Trust having issued the following statement, "The trust acknowledges her skills, expertise and commitment to the NHS and is pleased to have her contributing to the healthcare of its local population". What a shame that Professor Jones didn't recognise that skill, dedication and commitment fifteen months ago, in which case the NHS would have saved the many thousands of pounds they have spent in dealing with this case. Scarce resources that an NHS Trust with a reported financial deficit of £8million can hardly afford to waste. The Guardian newspaper have reported on the return of Mrs Nargund to her employment with St George's and their report can be read by clicking here. The Times also covered the story and their report can be read by clicking here and the BMJ report can be read by clicking here.
In March 2004 St George's Healthcare NHS Trust issued the following press statement:-
Professor Paul Jones is standing down as the Medical Director at St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust after five and a half years. Professor Jones’s term of office was due to end in November, but he would like to return to his academic post as Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the St George’s Medical School a little earlier. Prof Jones is a world leader in the science of health status measurement in lung disease. He wants to develop a number of research interests in this field that, for some time, have had to take second place to his work as Medical Director.Prof Jones has served almost two terms as Medical Director at the Trust, which runs St George’s Hospital in Tooting, the Bolingbroke Hospital in Battersea and the Wolfson Centre in Wimbledon. Trust Chief Executive Peter Homa thanked Professor Jones for his hard work: "The list of things Paul has contributed is enormous. If I can single out one, it his contribution to involving our senior doctors in management and decision-making. “I am sure all our staff will join me in thanking Paul for his hard work, for his contribution and for showing incredible fortitude and personal strength in helping to lead the Trust. He will be greatly missed.”Trust Chairman Naaz Coker said: “I have huge respect for Paul Jones. We have all benefited enormously from his guidance, support, experience and knowledge.”