Bullying has no place in NHS, chief tells MSPs

THE head of the NHS in Scotland said there is “no place” for bullying and harassment in the health service as MSPs quizzed him on whistle-blowing.

Giving evidence at Holyrood’s Public Petitions Committee, NHS Scotland chief executive Paul Gray said there was “no such thing in my world as low-level bullying”. He added: “If there is a sense that something like that is being normalised, then that is utterly, fundamentally wrong.”

The Public Petitions Committee has been looking at a petition calling for NHS staff to have an independent national whistle-blowing hotline to report “mismanagement and bullying”.

The petition, by campaigner Peter Gregson, proposes the hotline would replace the current NHS Scotland National Confidential Alert Line, a service he claims is seen as ineffectual.

Figures suggest the number of calls to the helpline was down by around 75 per cent in 2015, compared to when it was set up in 2013. Mr Gray said that does not mean confidence in the service is down.

He said: “The data may suggest the spike in calls at the beginning was because people had, in a sense, a bottled-up set of issues that they felt they had nowhere to go with. The National Confidential Alert Line met that need, so the reduction in calls may not actually indicate a loss of confidence in the system itself.”

Mr Gray admitted some NHS staff can be reluctant to raise official concerns out of fear of being victimised or a feeling nothing will change. He said that some fears may be “well-founded”, but others can simply be based on a “vague” concern.