Full statement by a whistleblowing consultant with Morecambe Bay Hospitals Trust...

We have here a lame duck management with no credibility.

I don’t think there is any respect left for them among the clinical staff.

Their inclination is to try to hang on to their jobs. A big fear is that Monitor will move in.

Certainly there’s been a veiled threat about removing the trust’s foundation status.

If this was lost it could potentially lead to a break-up of the trust.

This could happen along county lines with Royal Lancaster Infirmary being transferred to Preston and Furness General Hospital and Westmorland General Hospital to Whitehaven-Carlisle, but it is only guesswork.

There would be a great amount of uncertainty.

I don’t think it’s purely a problem with individual managers but with the whole culture.

There is far too much focus on empire building and not enough listening to clinical staff.

They are obsessed with hitting targets and box ticking.

I would have thought Tony Halsall would be considering his position on the board.

The groundswell of opinion among clinical staff is that there should be senior resignations across the trust.

I have never seen morale in the trust so low among senior clinical staff and it rubs off on the rest of staff.

If a doctor or nurse had made mistakes of a similar magnitude they would have been struck off.

It’s a case of the senior management having power but no accountability.

As well as losing the confidence of the clinical staff there is a real danger of the trust losing the confidence of the local population as a whole.

Under normal circumstances you would expect senior managers to do the decent thing and step aside, but there is no sign they will do so.

If the board is not prepared to step down, the Secretary of State for Health should intervene.

I also believe that consultants should be allowed to hold a vote of confidence in Mr Halsall and his board when they meet next month.

There has also been a failure of governance. I don’t think the governors have grasped the magnitude of the problems.

The worst is the failure of the follow-up appointments system.

More than 30,000 patients have been affected by this, leading to delays in treatment.

We have no idea how many patient may have suffered adverse outcomes as a result of this.

We’re not just talking about appointment delays of a few weeks, but months and a year-plus in some cases.

At a meeting 12-18 months ago, consultants told Mr Halsall about their concerns over the follow-up appointments delays, but he didn’t listen.

It’s simply disingenuous of him to say in his regular blog to staff that he didn’t know about the problem.

There is no doubt that people’s lives have been put at risk because of these failures.

It will take a good number of months to catch up and it’s difficult to believe that patient care won’t be harmed.

If this is not sorted out it is very quickly going to be very bad for the trust.

Management has irreparably lost the confidence of doctors and other clinical staff.

You could draw a parallel with the mid-Staffordshire hospital’s management failings – the obsession with hitting targets rather than focusing on clinical care, low staff morale, cost cutting, inadequate staffing, bullying and intimidatory atmosphere, disengagement between managers and clinical staff etc.

It’s become a general trend in the NHS, where hospitals are being run like sweatshops rather than as organisations committed to providing individual patient care.

But it is more pronounced in the Morecambe Bay trust.

I am speaking out because I want to see the trust run like it should be, with the focus on patients, but I want my identity kept secret because the NHS doesn’t treat whistle blowers sympathetically and I fear reprisals or even the loss of my job.

However, I don’t think I will be a lone voice.

I hope that by speaking out I will encourage more people to also express their views about the deplorable way the trust is being run.