GMC to commission independent review into treatment of whistleblowers

The General Medical Council has said that it will commission an independent review of how it deals with whistleblowers.

Speaking to MPs on the parliamentary health select committee on Tuesday, Niall Dickson, the GMC’s chief executive, said that there were things the regulator needed to learn from its interactions with whistleblowers. The committee heard that the GMC’s confidential whistleblower helpline had received over 1000 calls since it opened in 2012 and had led to 71 fitness to practise cases being opened.1

The committee member Charlotte Leslie asked Dickson why the “whistleblower community” said that the GMC often supported “the bad guys.” Dickson said, “We have had quite a lot of conversations with Kim Holt [the paediatrician who had flagged up concerns about problems at St Ann’s Hospital in north London, where Baby P was later seen] and with some, as you put it, within the whistleblower community. I’m absolutely prepared to accept that there are things we can learn from this process.

“What I won’t accept is that this is all dead easy and these are the good guys and these are the bad guys, because it isn’t as simple as that. One of the things we are prepared to do is to review how we handle the whistleblowing area and how we manage to deal with people who say they are whistleblowers, and we want to get this right.”

Dickson said that GMC staff were not “nasty” to people because they were whistleblowers, nor did they favour hospital trust management. He said, “If there are things that we can learn then we will learn. And we will get someone external to come and look at how we handle that process of where people identify themselves as whistleblowers.”

The bigger issue, Dickson said, was how to change the culture in NHS organisations. “A whistleblower is a sign that the thing has failed. It’s about creating culture in which people can raise small concerns, medium concerns, and big concerns and they’re dealt with and answered.”

However, Dickson admitted that changes could be made to the GMC’s processes. “Having listened to a lot of whistleblowers it is very well for us to say, ‘Well, we’ve got our procedures and they work and inevitably somebody is going to dislike them.’ But I think there are lessons that we need to learn and we will reflect on them and we will conduct an external review and we will publish the results.”

He said there was currently no timeframe for the review because the GMC was still drawing up terms of reference.