WOMAN WITH NO SHAME The charge sheetWOM
Boss of NHS trust damned by official reports quits her £240k job... then reveals she’ll stay on in another role at the SAME trust with the SAME huge pay packet
AN NHS boss who failed to investigate more than 1,000 deaths triggered outrage last night after she resigned but kept her £240,000 pay package.
Katrina Percy announced yesterday that she was stepping down as chief executive of Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust following growing criticism over her leadership.
But to the fury of families and MPs, the trust later confirmed she would be staying on as a ‘strategic adviser’ on the same £190,000-a-year salary with £50,000 paid into her pension.
The organisation, which cares for patients with mental health needs and learning difficulties, has been under intense scrutiny since last year following a spate of damning reports.
An inquiry in December found the trust had failed to investigate up to 1,259 ‘unexplained’ deaths over a four-year period because managers did not deem them serious enough.
The victims included 18-year- old Connor Sparrowhawk, who drowned in a bath in 2013 after suffering an epileptic seizure at a centre in Oxford.
Then an investigation in April by the Care Quality Commission warned that patients were still being put at risk because staff were failing to learn from their mistakes.
Further concerns were raised about Miss Percy’s role in July when it emerged the trust had paid millions of pounds to companies run by her former colleagues.
Yet the 43-year-old, who became chief executive of the trust in April 2011, repeatedly refused to resign and insisted the organisation was ‘absolutely focused’ on making improvements. Yesterday, however, she suddenly announced she was ‘stepping down’ as chief executive and taking on her new job – on the same salary – advising GPs.
The Mail had asked the trust only last week whether Miss Percy was about to resign – after we were tipped off by a source – and were firmly told this was untrue.
A spokesman for the trust insisted yesterday
‘This appointment will leave a sour taste’
that Miss Percy’s decision to step down had ‘come together very recently’.
Grieving families and MPs said her reappointment as an adviser to the trust smacked of ‘rewarding failure’.
Dr Sara Ryan, Connor Sparrowhawk’s mother, said: ‘It’s shocking and scandalous that she’s on the same salary for now doing a tin-pot tiny bit of work. You can’t be doing a job like that on a chief exec salary if you failed at being a chief exec, it’s just ludicrous. It just wouldn’t happen in the private sector.
‘If you failed at running a company, you wouldn’t be allowed to just go and do a little bit of work on the same salary, you’d be sacked straight away. There are deep flaws here in the way in which the system works.
‘She should have been sacked when the review came out [in December], she should have been sacked then.
‘I’ve never actually understood how she could possibly go into work every morning knowing everything that unfolded. The buck does stop at the top.
‘She was leading an organisation that was clearly failing at so many different levels.’
Tory MP Nicholas Soames said: ‘These people running Southern Health are clearly not fit. How dare they allow this failed chief exec to stay as adviser on same salary.’
Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb said: ‘ There will naturally be a great deal of scepticism over her appointment in another highly-paid role at the trust, which in many ways smacks of rewarding failure.
‘It is ultimately a matter for Southern Health who they employ, but the circumstances of this appointment will leave a sour taste, particularly for the families of those who lost their lives in the trust’s care.
‘What the families have wanted throughout this dreadful saga is for the relevant people to be held to account.’
Miss Percy, who has already amassed a pension pot of almost £500,000 during her 16 years’ service in the NHS, said she was ‘delighted’ to be taking on her new role advising GPs.
In a statement, she added: ‘I have reflected on the effect the ongoing personal media atten-
tion has had on staff and patients and have come to the conclusion that this has made my role untenable. I have therefore come to the difficult decision to step down from my role as chief executive after nine years.
‘I am delighted to be taking on an alternative role, providing strategic advice to local GP leaders as they work with others to transform the way in which health services are delivered across Hampshire, and I feel that now is the right time to take on that new challenge.
‘I know, and understand, that many will say I should have stepped down sooner given the very public concerns which have been raised in the past months.
‘I stayed on as I firmly believed it was my responsibility to oversee the necessary improvements and to continue the ground breaking work we have begun with GPs to transform care for our patients.’
Justine Spencer, expert medical negligence lawyer and partner at Irwin Mitchell, the law firm representing several of the families of patients who died, said: ‘This will do little to quell the anguish of families who feel they are yet to have answers around the care their loved ones received prior to their deaths.
‘The most important thing here is that failings are properly acknowledged, those accountable for those failings are properly held to account and, ultimately, lessons are learned.
‘These are the only changes which can offer any comfort to the grieving families we represent.’
Southern Health provides services to 45,000 people across Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.
It employs around 9,000 staff who work from over 200 sites, including community hospitals, health centres, inpatient units and social care services.
Concerns over the trust were first raised last October when a jury at Connor Sparrowhawk’s inquest ruled his death had been preventable.
They accused managers of serious failings.
Slade House, the Oxford unit where he was being looked after, was subsequently closed.
Then an independent report in December found that the trust had failed to investigate 1,259 unexplained deaths between April 2011 and March 2015.
Managers did not classify them as serious incidents so did not bother to probe them any further.
The CQC investigated the trust in April and warned there were still ‘long-standing risks’ to the thousands of patients under its care.
And last month the trust admitted paying millions of pounds to companies linked to Miss Percy, including £5million to one company run by a former colleague.
The trust has named Julie Dawes, who joined in May as director of nursing and quality, as its interim chief executive officer.
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