Opinion

Newton Emerson: Department of Health priorities skewed as it launches inquiry into leaks

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Dunmurry Manor  Care home on the outskirts of Belfast. Picture by Colm Lenaghan, Pacemaker
Dunmurry Manor Care home on the outskirts of Belfast. Picture by Colm Lenaghan, Pacemaker Dunmurry Manor Care home on the outskirts of Belfast. Picture by Colm Lenaghan, Pacemaker

The Department of Health has leapt into action over the Dunmurry Manor care home scandal - by immediately launching an inquiry into who leaked letters to the Irish News, and ordering all health trusts to do the same.

Trusts have been given two weeks to report back, showing how quickly things can move when officials view a matter as urgent.

Dunmurry Manor opened in 2014: in December 2016, the Commissioner for Older People was contacted separately by two former employees of the home and two families of residents to say they had complained of poor and unsafe practices but had not received a satisfactory response.

The commissioner’s report was published in June this year. It said Northern Ireland’s main health inspection quango - the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA) - had repeatedly found the home to be meeting standards when “terrible incidents were occurring.”

RQIA last inspected Dunmurry just one month before the report was published, after an anonymous source tipped it off about ongoing concerns, but although it found six areas needing improvement - including poor hygiene and untreated wounds - no enforcement action was taken because inspectors found “good practice” elsewhere.

The Public Health Agency, another oversight quango, reported a C difficile outbreak at Dunmurry one week after the commissioner’s report and seven weeks after a resident died. At least two cases are required to declare an ‘outbreak’ but the agency declined to give details on other cases.

This gives some idea of the timescale bureaucracy normally operates on, even on matters of life and death.

The leaking of the letters is serious - they relate to two nurses who held management roles - and advise checking their references before employing them. Both are now believed to be under investigation by their professional body. Anyone in this situation deserves the presumption of innocence and the Irish News has not named the nurses.

However, the public also deserves protection. Given the sluggish official response to Dunmurry, the leaking and publication of the letters has a public interest defence in law, which can be balanced against the department’s stated concern that the leak is a “potential breach” of data protection legislation.

The Commissioner for Older People describes the people who contacted it in 2016 as “whistleblowers”.

Under public interest disclosure legislation, whistleblowers are meant to report issues internally if at all possible. If they go to an outside organisation such as the commissioner, or to a newspaper, they must have reasonable grounds to believe their concern is serious and raising it internally would cause them to be penalised or the matter to be concealed.

‘Reasonable’ is defined as what an employment tribunal would find reasonable and ‘serious’ is usually cited as a risk to health and safety.

Under these circumstances, a whistleblower has legal protection when going straight to the press.

Irish News health correspondent Seanin Graham has compared the Department of Health’s new leak investigation to the 2011 ‘Lissue files’ scandal, when the most senior health officials in Northern Ireland ordered a cabinet office inquiry into who passed information about historical abuse at a Lisburn care home to this newspaper. More than 80 people were grilled by Whitehall officials over a five-month period, although the source was never found.

Lissue was subsequently investigated by the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, which finally reported last year - six years after the leak and thanks in no small part to it. Three previous reports into the home had never been made public.

The Hyponatraemia inquiry into the deaths of five children in Northern Ireland hospitals must also be considered relevant.

The longest inquiry in UK legal history, its extraordinary 14-year duration was due to obfuscation and the closing of ranks by officialdom and the medical profession. In his final report, published this January, inquiry chair Mr Justice O’Hara found the entire system from top to bottom had conspired to conceal the truth and put its own reputation before the public interest.

Combined with the continued practice of sacking, gagging and blacklisting whistleblowers - in contravention of law and NHS guidelines - it is entirely reasonable for any health worker to believe a serious concern should be taken directly to an outside body or to the press.

If the Department of Health wants to change that, hunting leakers is not the answer. It needs to demonstrate beyond doubt that it takes the law on whistleblowing at least as seriously as it claims to take the law on data protection.

newton@irishnews.com