A respected NHS surgeon who raised concerns about patient safety and the death of a patient later found himself fighting for his own career after speaking out about standards of care.
Peter Duffy was a consultant urologist at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust and had led its urology department from 2003.
His unit won a national award for the quality of its work in 2008, but over subsequent years Mr Duffy became increasingly concerned about near misses and what he believed were patterns of poor care within the service.
The situation escalated following the death of elderly patient Peter Read from sepsis at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary in January 2015.
Mr Duffy believed there were serious questions surrounding the circumstances of the death and the way it was subsequently handled.
He eventually reported the case, together with his wider patient safety concerns, to the Care Quality Commission.
Anonymous complaints made against surgeon
While Mr Duffy was raising concerns, anonymous letters had also been sent to his professional regulator, the General Medical Council.
The letters, sent between 2012 and 2014, contained allegations which could potentially have raised questions about his fitness to practise.
An employment judge later found the letters appeared to have originated from someone within Mr Duffy’s own department.
The allegations contained within them were not substantiated.
It meant that while the consultant was raising concerns about patient safety within his NHS department, someone apparently working alongside him was anonymously reporting him to his professional regulator.
Surgeon takes NHS trust to tribunal
Mr Duffy resigned in 2016, alleging a breach of contract and describing what he believed had become a campaign against him following his disclosures.
He subsequently took his case to an employment tribunal.
Following six days of hearings at Manchester Employment Tribunal, a panel found in his favour in April 2018.
Mr Duffy was awarded more than £102,000 for unfair dismissal and unlawful deduction of wages.
But the tribunal victory did not immediately allow him to rebuild his NHS career.
Mr Duffy subsequently said he was unable to secure another position with an NHS trust in England and eventually took a surgical post in the Isle of Man, which operates separately from the NHS in England.
He later described feeling as though he had been “hunted” by the system in which he had spent his career.
GMC investigation eventually dropped
Years after the employment tribunal proceedings, Mr Duffy faced another investigation by the General Medical Council.
The investigation involved emails connected with a patient’s care which had not emerged until 2020, despite purportedly dating from around six years earlier.
Mr Duffy questioned why the material had not been produced during the earlier proceedings if it had been available at the time.
The GMC case against him was eventually dropped.
Review identifies hundreds of patients who suffered actual or potential harm
Five years after Mr Duffy left the trust, an independent review into the urology service was published in 2021.
The review identified 520 patients who had suffered actual or potential harm and raised serious concerns about the safety of the service over a period spanning two decades.
The trust subsequently apologised.
The findings gave significant weight to concerns about the service Mr Duffy had spent years attempting to bring to the attention of those responsible for patient safety.
MBE for services to healthcare
Mr Duffy subsequently documented his experiences in two books, Whistle in the Wind and Smoke and Mirrors, detailing his experiences of raising concerns within the NHS and the consequences he says followed.
In 2022, he was awarded an MBE for services to healthcare.
His case has since become part of the wider debate surrounding the treatment of NHS whistleblowers and whether doctors and other healthcare professionals can raise serious patient-safety concerns without jeopardising their own careers.
