One Week With John Gulliver - Frothing with anger: Baby Peter whistleblower Dr Kim Holt fights for her job

Published: 20 May, 2010

DR Kim Holt is not happy with her cappuccino. Too much froth, not enough coffee. So she takes it back to the counter, politely complains, and a replacement is promptly served.
If only her hospital life had been so simple, I thought, as she told me in a coffee bar in Belsize Park on Thursday about the events two years ago that led her into trouble following the “Baby Peter” scandal.
Dr Holt, a consultant paediatrician at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), had been warning her bosses for two years that chaotic mismanagement in her clinic at St Anne’s Hospital, Haringey – run by GOSH – would lead to tragedy.

As we know, vital signs of Baby Peter’s shocking injuries – including a broken back – were missed two days before his death. 
Dr Holt believes firmly that if her warnings had been heeded the tragedy may not have happened.
Unable to cope with the workload in an under-staffed department, and crushed by a sense of her own powerlessness to change things, Dr Holt became ill and was diagnosed with depression.

“The management culture in the NHS is so horrific,” she told me in a rare interview. “It is as if you are being permanently watched and monitored. In Haringey, we know we had hundreds of children and we couldn’t deal with it properly because of the workload. We had no control over what we were doing – essentially that led to depression.”
It took six months to recover but when Dr Holt then asked for her job back she was told it was “impossible” and that a return would be “bad for her health”.

She is currently seconded to another ward in GOSH but is on rolling three-month contracts without job security. Dr Holt believes she was seen as the “ringleader” by critics and that “spurious reasons” had been invented to prevent her from returning to her job. If her whistle-blowing has brought her down, does she regret it?
“A child died,” she said. “I feel I owe it to him. I think what I have done is in the public interest.”
Since Baby Peter’s death GOSH has employed seven more consultants at St Anne’s.

“So why don’t they give me my job back?” says Dr Holt. “What is the justification for keeping me on full pay for all this time – but not in my job?”
Great Ormond Street says it is in mediation talks with Dr Holt about her reinstatement. An NHS report into her case said: “In our view, there is a real question as to whether it can fairly be said that, having raised the concerns that she did (which in our view would fall squarely within the Whistleblowers’ Policy), she has been supported and protected as the policy suggests. Subjectively, we consider that she is entitled to feel that she has not had the promised protection.

“It is crucial that staff should feel able to raise concerns when matters arise which concern them and they should feel confident, when doing so, that those concerns will be treated appropriately and, as importantly, that they will not suffer adversely when doing.”
On the whistle-blowing policy, Dr Holt told me: “It stops you being sacked, but it doesn’t get you back into your job. It stops the negative, but it makes the positive very difficult.”

Great books? It’s no mystery, says Rendell

What does it take to write great fiction? A certain iciness of persona, according to best-selling crime author Ruth Rendell, who last week treated an audience at West End Lane Books in West Hampstead to a reading from her novel Portobello – set around Portobello Road and the Westway in Westbourne Grove.
“My characters sometimes try to take over a plot and I have to crush them,” said the novelist, who lives in Maida Vale. “You have to remember what Graham Greene said about authors of fiction: ‘There’s always a little splinter of ice in them.’ He meant that you could be at the deathbed of a dear and close friend or relative and you would be taking down notes.”

Ruth, who also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, spoke about how she got the idea for her London novels, including King Solomon’s Carpet, about the London Underground, and The Keys to the Street, which is set in Regent’s Park.
“A plot will originate in some idea or soundbite,” she said. “Portobello started with the fact that in the street the trees always got signs stuck to them about some poor missing cat or dog.

“One day there was a notice pinned on a tree saying a sum of money between £50 and £200 had been found and if someone had lost it, could they please apply to the number below. I thought, who could have lost this? And that when they rang the number they would have to say exactly how much money it was.”

The author also revealed which novelists she most admires – Dickens, Trollope and Wilkie Collins – and one she dislikes – Virginia Woolf.
“There’s a great virtue   to a book being unputdownable,” she said. “If it’s easy to stop reading it, the author has failed. I think the great Victorian novels have that virtue. The Woman in White is one of my favourites. It’s so exciting. Even if you’ve read it before, you long to have it served up to you again.”

Getting a vote past the post

NICE touch from a senior official at the Town Hall, who manages the “elections” office.
Apologising “unreservedly” after the Royal Mail failed to deliver a postal voting form to a Camden doctor working in Scotland, he told her by email: “I am very sorry that we have let you down on such an important matter.”  

He then advised her about how she could make a formal complaint. 
The doctor could have been swotted away with a stereotyped letter from a junior clerk. 
Instead, her complaint was dealt with by an old hand whom I have known for years but will not name because he has always shunned the spotlight and he might be embarrassed.