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Victimised health chief wins record damages
A SENIOR NHS manager yesterday won record damages against a Yorkshire health trust which failed to appoint her to a new post because she was too old.
Managers at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust were found to have behaved in a "high-handed, malicious, insulting and oppressive" manner in further victimising Linda Sturdy who was passed over in 2006 for a position running breast screening services for 124,000 women in Leeds, Wakefield and Pontefract in favour of a colleague 13 years her junior.
In a damning judgment yesterday, an employment tribunal in Leeds awarded maximum damages of 33,500 for injury to feelings over the age discrimination and a further 5,700 in aggravated damages – the highest award ever for injury to feelings for any act of discrimination in the UK.
Further hearings will be held later this year over further claims against the trust which risks paying up to 1m in damages and costs in the case.
Last night Mrs Sturdy, 58, who lives near Ripon, said she felt "vindicated".
"At long last someone has taken me seriously," she said.
"I would hope the trust will make sure this sort of thing never happens again and nobody will be treated in the way I have been.
"It's been absolutely dreadful. The last couple of years have been very traumatic and extremely stressful.
"It takes away your self esteem. I had reached the pinnacle of my career and it was all pulled from underneath me – I felt crushed by what they did to me."
In the tribunal ruling, Judge Christine Lee said the injury to Mrs Sturdy's feelings was "about as serious as it gets".
She had suffered from a series of decisions which would have left her fearing "what would come next" after being discriminated against in failing to get the position that should have been hers and being threatened with the sack if she did not take up a more junior role.
The trust had been determined to impose its own will on Mrs Sturdy, who despite service of 17 years was "relatively powerless" and must have felt she had run up against a "brick wall".
"She was at the end of her career and all the dignity of her post seemed to have been taken away from her," she said.
Judge Lee said managers had been "malicious and insulting" in accusing her of not making her claims of age discrimination in good faith.
They had failed to carry out an unbiased investigation into her claims which was "high handed, insulting and oppressive" and then put Mrs Sturdy through an eight-day tribunal hearing where they were forced to admit they had failed to follow their own procedures.
It was "simply unacceptable" and "beyond the pale" that one manager Brian Godfrey had told the tribunal Mrs Sturdy had no interest or knowledge of wider issues in breast screening when he had no evidence to support that.
Judge Lee said Mrs Sturdy had been speedily dismissed by the trust in contrast to the repeated delays in dealing with her complaints which was an "abuse of power". There was also no evidence anyone at the trust had been reprimanded over what had happened. She added: "It's one thing to discriminate against a person, it's another to humiliate her in the way her grievance and her claim is dealt with, and as of today there is still no apology."
Jackie Green, director of human resources at the trust, said: "Whilst we are aware of and fully recognise the ruling of the tribunal in the Linda Sturdy case, the trust totally rejects any suggestion that as an organisation our policies or procedures discriminate against older employees. More than a fifth of staff who currently work for the trust are over 50, and they make a huge contribution to the success of the organisation at all levels and provide some of our most reliable and hard-working employees."
Numbers of over-60s working at the trust increased last year and there had even been a slight increase in the numbers working beyond 65."The Healthcare Commission's recently published staff survey results showed that employees at Leeds teaching hospitals overall had a higher than average level of job satisfaction compared to similar NHS trusts and here in Leeds the over-50 age group was one of the age categories
who said they were most satisfied with their job," she added.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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