Health Services: Disclosure of Information
(asked on 26th July 2024) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many NHS whistleblowers were heeded and were satisfied with the response of their employers.
The following table shows the data reported to the National Guardian’s Office (NGO) on the total number of workers that provided feedback about their experience of speaking up to Freedom to Speak Up Guardians, and the proportion of those workers who said they would speak up again, each year from 2019 to 2024:
Year | Number of workers who provided feedback on their experience of speaking up | Proportion of cases where workers provided feedback | Number of workers that provided feedback and said they would speak up again |
2019/20 | 4,770 | 29.4% | 4,065 (85.2%) |
2020/21 | 6,491 | 31.8% | 5,473 (84.3%) |
2021/22 | 6,005 | 29.5% | 5,112 (85.1%) |
2022/23 | 7,204 | 28.6% | 5,995 (83.2%) |
2023/24 | 8,441 | 26.2% | 6,734 (79.8%) |
Note: feedback received may be about cases that were raised in a previous financial year
Speaking up cases brought to Freedom to Speak Up Guardians may include whistleblowing, however they may also be issues for improvement or wider matters which would not meet a formal definition of whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is when someone who works for an employer raises a concern by making a disclosure in the public interest via provisions in the Employment Rights Act 1996, as amended by the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. Speaking up is about encouraging a positive culture where people feel they can speak up about anything that gets in the way of providing good care, that their voices will be heard, and their suggestions acted upon.
The above data is collected anonymously from individual organisations and provided voluntarily to the NGO by Guardians, and as such could represent an incomplete picture. Guardians are one of many routes to speaking up internally within an organisation. Employees may also speak up to regulators, some of which may be captured as whistleblowing.