Published 24 July 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b2693
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b2693

Feature

Whistleblowing

Name and shame

¹ Hertfordshire

When health workers raise the alarm about standards of care, they can end up feeling as guilty as the organisations they expose, Jane Cassidy reports

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Steve Bolsin is one of the best known whistleblowers in UK medical history. The consultant anaesthetist experienced career damage and professional isolation after raising concerns about death rates in paediatric heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary in the 1990s.

Nearly 20 years on, he says he is "a modern day exile from the NHS," indelibly marked by the process of exposing the problems at the United Bristol Healthcare Trust.^{1 2} Professor Bolsin wrote his first letter of concern to the then trust chief executive in 1990, five years before the death of Joshua Loveday, the last of 29 babies and toddlers who died after having complex open heart surgery at the hospital. A further four were left brain damaged.

He says he couldn’t take "another day of knowing that a child was being sacrificed once more on the altar of surgical pride, institutional indifference, and professional impotence."

It was five . . . [Full text of this article]

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