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Rose Gibb broke her silence on the C-diff scandal this week, claiming she was “victimised and demonised” by health chiefs.
She broke down in tears at the High Court as she talked in detail about her sudden exit as chief executive of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust.
She left in October 2007, just days before the Healthcare Commission blamed hygiene failures for 90 deaths linked to C-diff at her hospitals.
Miss Gibb is now suing the trust for £175,000, part of a combined £250,000 pay-off she claims is unpaid.
During the hearing she admitted the commission’s report – which described patients lying in their own excrement in hospital beds - was “appalling”.
But under cross examination from the trust’s counsel, Jane McNeill, Miss Gibb gave an impassioned defence of her record.
She said: “If I personally have presided knowingly in a set of actions that resulted in the death or harm to a patient I would have resigned.
“The police and Health and Safety Executive reviewed this and said there was no evidence to blame an individual or the corporate body.”
She said when she realised there was a C-diff outbreak in 2006 she commissioned an external investigation into what was happening in the hospitals.
“Infection control was a matter of great concern to the trust and the Department of Health,” she said.
But she said that until the summer of 2006 the government’s focus was on another superbug, MRSA.
Miss Gibb took issue with the C-diff statistics quoted by the Healthcare Commission.
She told the court: “I believe that some patients had died as a result of contracting C-diff. We do not know how many and over what period of time. That is no different to the rest of the NHS.”
She said if hospital bosses had to resign every time a patient died, “an awful lot of NHS chief executive posts would be empty”.
In a defiant statement, she told the court: “From the Healthcare Commission report and the way it has been handled, the focus has been on myself.
“I have been hounded, victimised and demonised by the local NHS and the secretary of state.”
She said the terms of her exit effectively “gagged” her from being able to defend herself because the agreement contained a confidentiality clause.
Miss Gibb said: “I complied fully with the agreement and I could have defended myself though whatever mechanisms were available to me had I not been gagged.
“The trust are aware I had a massive gang of media camping outside my house and they did nothing at all. They left the media at my door.
“I was scapegoated. Quite clearly people wanted to have a head and to manage the report by having my head.
“I can only assume, by inserting the clause, the trust didn’t want me to talk about the NHS, the Healthcare Commission and the unreasonableness of what they were doing. The clause protected them, not me.”
She suggested the commission took an “unfair and unreasonable approach” in forming some of their conclusions, including the calculation for the numbers of patients who died and criticisms the trust missed certain targets.
She said that measures to make people wash their hands were put in place at Maidstone Hospital, Pembury Hospital and the Kent and Sussex Hospital in 2005.
She said she personally cleared the shelves of broad-spectrum antibiotics after concerns were raised that they made people more vulnerable to C-diff infection.
The report’s claim that the trust was missing A&E waiting time targets did not explain that it was because the number of beds in wards had been reduced to prevent the spread of infection, she said.
She also took issue with the commission’s description of her as “autocratic” and “difficult to challenge.”
Miss Gibb painted a picture of a trust battling severe problems and low morale, partly caused by the critical Healthcare Commission report.
“They were tired of being undermined. It was a very difficult 15 months. This was a top management team that was working 18-20 hour days in earnest, getting things resolved.
“Problems existed in the hospitals before my employment. I sought support from the Strategic Health Authority to change the wards at the Kent and Sussex and make improvements but the SHA declined to support because it was not value for money.”
“They didn’t want to spend the money improving patient safety.”
She said the conditions of the buildings at the Kent and Sussex and Pembury hospitals were the worst she had seen in her NHS career.
“I tried to improve the situation with the resources we had,” she added.
Asked by her counsel, Oliver Segal, how infected patients were dealt with, Miss Gibb said: “We placed them in closed down wards because of the pressure. We tried to segregate them and opened up areas which suddenly required extra staff.
“No hospital has a pool of staff waiting to work, so it meant we had to staff those areas using bank and agency staff, or take staff from other wards.”
Asked how she saw the role as chief executive, Miss Gibb said: “Having ultimate reponsibility for good clinical care and governance and to make sure I had in place people to take these steps to improve patients’ safety.”
It emerged that the trust’s former chairman, James Lee, was preparing her departure in September 2007.
Miss Gibb said she was not aware of the plans until October.
She sobbed as she recalled attending a meeting on October 1, 2007, where she was told by the trust’s former chairman James Lee, and non-executive director Aaron Cockell that her employment was being terminated.
Up until that point she still expected to hold onto her £150,000 a year role and lead the trust through the aftermath of the report.
At the meeting, she says she was told approval had been given by the Strategic Health Authority and Department of Health for her departure.
But during the High Court hearing it emerged that the Department of Health and the Treasury did not give final approval for her severance package.
Miss Gibb told Mr Justice Treacy: “This was a done deal, a fait accompli. I was stressed and crying and I made notes as best I could.
“I left the meeting, said goodbye and got a few things. I was upset and on our way home me and my husband pulled up at a Holiday Inn [at Wrotham Heath], had a coffee and I tried to calm down. I then made more notes about what had happened.”
After four hours giving evidence, her ordeal was over when Mr Segal asked her one short, final question - did she ever consider she resigned voluntarily?
“No.”
