Marie Grant Chief Nurse And Director Of Operations
Marie Grant gave evidence at my internal disciplinary hearing where she said, without producing any evidence to support the statement at all, that in her opinion my position as finance director was untenable and irreversible and that she had no confidence in working with me. When asked about the cancelled operations figures, although again offering no evidence to support the statement, Marie Grant said that it was well known throughout the hospital that information provided by the Patient Administration System (PAS) was unreliable and that if John Parkes had altered the figures it would have been for a good reason. (This statement was not recorded in the written notes of my Internal Hearing that were produced by the NHS Trust, but was recorded in the hand written notes from which the printed notes were transcribed and which I highlighted to the Employment Tribunal). The suggestion that the PAS system was unreliable was of course a totally false statement, which has been completely contradicted by the statement given by Wendy McCarthy the Trust's Head of Information to my Employment Tribunal hearing, where she stated that the information provided by PAS was robust and accurate. Marie Grant’s view also does not seem to be shared by the Trust’s Director of Modernisation Janet Hunter, who when asked at the November 2002 Public Board Meeting about the quality of the Trust’s activity information, stated that it was robust and accurate. When questioned about the critical e-mail Mrs Grant had sent to all the Executive Directors following my disclosure regarding the cancelled operations, in which she had said that, “It’s so important that our staff see us working as a team, it was therefore disappointing to see this e-mail from Ian”, she said that she wasn’t concerned about the detail of the issue but with my style in raising it. When under further questioning it was put to Mrs Grant that if I had not sent the e-mail the Executive Group would never have discussed the issue, she agreed that she had misunderstood the sequence of events and that her e-mail had perhaps been inappropriate. In any event Kelly Goulding's statement confirms that she told John Parke's, "That we had two cancellations that were due to no theatre time and no surgeon which were unlikely to have been cancelled in advance and should be reported" and that John Parkes response was, "That 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". There was no suggestion at this stage that there was any problem about definitions as evidenced by the dates on the e-mails that show that this point was only raised after the issue of incorrect reporting the figures had already been raised. The question of definitions was only something that was brought up after I had supported Kelly Goulding by raising the issue with the Chief Executive, in my view to try and provide an excuse for Mr. Parkes behaviour in relation to Kelly Goulding, who says in her statement, “ 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”.
All of this demonstrates that my board colleagues did not welcome the fact that I had correctly backed Kelly Goulding in this matter and that because I had raised the issue of the fraudulent reporting of the cancelled operations, it caused tension in my relationship with and them and that is why in October 2001, as Ian Hamilton confirms in the Management Statement of Case, Marie Grant and Paul Jones complained for the first time about my management style, not to me, as you would have expected team colleagues to have done, but to him. As with the other management witnesses Marie Grant admitted under questioning that she had never raised with me either formally or informally any of the serious concerns that she said she had with me at the disciplinary hearing, nor had she chosen to attend one of my lunch time finance seminars held every six weeks and to which I invited all staff to attend to better acquaint themselves with the financial procedures and practices operating within the Trust. Yet in her statement Marie Grant made the incredible and completely untrue claim, that I had shown a reluctance to discuss the calculation of costing tariffs with her and the other executive directors and general managers. When I pointed out to her at the internal hearing, that I had done a presentation on this very topic to a special meeting of the Trust Board on the 5th June 2002 and had explained that the marginal prices declared by the Trust were in any event not calculated by the Finance Directorate, but were in fact being calculated quite against the rules of the NHS Costing Manual on the instructions of the Chief Executive by Barbara Ghodes the Contracts Manager, who was in fact just making the costs up in order to effectively profiteer from NHS purchasers, Mrs Grant agreed that she had not said at that meeting that she had any concerns or problems with my explanation, she said that although she had been present at the meeting, in relation to what had been covered she said, “I can’t remember”. In addition the notes taken by Colin Watts at the Investigatory Meeting held on the 8th August, even state in his own heavily doctored notes of that meeting, that he remembers a disagreement about this subject between Professor Jones and myself. While Paddy Quill my solicitor’s notes confirm that what Mr Watts actually said was that there were extensive debates on the subject of costing systems. I was also able to produce to the hearing the e-mails sent by the Finance Directorates Income Controller Ian Harris in response to Mrs Grants original enquiries, which provide incontrovertible proof that Mrs Grant had been well briefed on the subject and had been invited to raise any other problems or concerns that she might have had on the subject.
The issue therefore arises as to why the Chief Nurse should make such clearly false statements about me. I think the logical conclusion is that, taking account of Ian Hamilton’s Managements Statement of Case, which states that Mrs Grant first raised concerns about me in October 2001, the exact time that I alerted the Board to the fact that the Trust had submitted fraudulent cancelled operations figures to the London Regional Office of the NHS and from the tone of her e-mail sent at the time, which she now admits was inappropriate, the reason she made these false allegations is because of the protected disclosure that I made in October 2001 and which prevented the Trust from achieving a “Three Star Rating”. I leave you to decide whether you agree with me.
