Review of email sent in error to Junior Doctors
This is the letter we have shared today with our medical colleagues regarding the incident.
Dear Medical Colleagues
As promised, we have treated the sharing of The Times article with you as a serious incident and undertaken a review into the circumstances surrounding this. I was mortified to learn of it and I want to apologise for the deep offence and upset this has understandably caused. I would want to reiterate again that the article does not reflect my view or that of our executive team and we would never have wanted or asked for that letter to be shared with you. However, as an executive team we take full responsibility for what is shared, inadvertently or not, and I am so very sorry that this happened. We can and have to do better than this.
As part of our internal review process, we asked senior and junior clinical colleagues to provide support for the review into what happened and they kindly agreed.
This letter accompanies the full review. In order to protect those involved, we have specifically not given names or roles and we have checked with those individuals affected that they were happy before this review has been shared. The judgement in knowing what level of information and detail to share in order to convey the facts of the matter, while also recognising that there are individuals involved, is a very difficult one. I hope you feel this review strikes the right balance and gives as much transparency as possible in explaining what happened and that you can believe me when I say that sending that email to you was an error. This occurred as a result of the Swiss cheese effect where a series of individual things that could go wrong did and lined up to create an upsetting impact. As an executive team we take responsibility for lack of a rigorous process around items being shared with you and we have already made changes so that this couldn’t happen again, for example, ensuring the restrictions on who can send to all Junior Doctors are reapplied and ensuing there is a good process around sharing information onwards that arrives into the Executive suite.
There are, though, people at the centre of this incident who are deeply distressed, some colleagues who are junior and very new. I would ask you to please be mindful of that when sharing things and commenting on this incident. How we treat each other in our #1BigTeam creates our culture and reflects on us and we own our behaviour. In line with our just and learning culture, we are supporting these colleagues and we will take the learning from the review and apply it so we can mitigate against anything like this happening again.
I am grateful for the interest and support of our clinical colleagues and will keep working with and listening to them, taking their advice on how we can best move forward. I hope this closes this issue and we can work together with respect and trust going forward.
With kindest regards
Ann
