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Abstract
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A surgical trainee who was sexually assaulted by a colleague has won an employment tribunal case against her trust after the investigation into the incident questioned her relationships and failed to fully suspend the perpetrator until police told the hospital that he had been arrested for an alleged sexual assault on a girl under the age of 16.
Elizabeth,* who worked as a surgeon at Royal Stoke University Hospital, was assaulted on a late shift at work on 11 June 2020. A colleague asked to speak to her in the urology office before forcibly kissing her face and neck, massaging her back, touching her waist, and blocking her as she pushed him away to leave the room. The perpetrator did not challenge Elizabeth's account of events at the tribunal.
She texted friends to tell them what had happened after her shift and reported the incident to her educational supervisor the next day. What followed was an investigation that her BMA representative said was plagued with "a catalogue of mistakes." One of these mistakes, which the tribunal found amounted to harassment, was that the case investigator asked her colleagues questions about her character and "inappropriate relationships"--questions that were not asked of the perpetrator. The Birmingham employment tribunal ruled on 17 July 2023 that she had been unlawfully discriminated against by the University Hospitals North Midlands NHS Trust on grounds of sex.
The story comes after an investigation by The BMJ and the Guardian found that NHS trusts recorded more than 35 000 cases of rape, sexual assault, harassment, stalking, and abusive remarks from 2017 to 2022, but only one in 10 trusts had a dedicated policy to manage the problem. University Hospitals North Midlands did not have a dedicated policy, the tribunal observed, and when Elizabeth looked online for the Dignity at Work policy, which covered sexual assault, the link took her to a broken webpage.
The tribunal found that the trust's policies were inadequate and that staff were not aware of them or trained in them. Multiple freedom of information requests sent to the trust, which are published on the trust's website, show that her assault was not officially recorded despite it being reported to human resources (HR).
Language: en |