NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #32

[nauticant]

Sandie Peggie, a nurse at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy (VH), has brought claims in the employment tribunal against her employer; Fife Health Board (the Board) and another employee, Dr B Upton. Ms Peggie’s claims are of sexual harassment, harassment related to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation. Dr Upton claims to be a transwoman, that is observed as male at birth but asserting a female gender identity.

The Employment Tribunal hearing started on Monday 3 February 2025 and was expected to last 2 weeks. However, after 2 weeks it was not complete and it adjourned part-heard. It resumed on 16 July and the last day of evidence will be 28 July and then there will be 2 days of submissions from counsel meaning that the hearing will end on 30 July.

The hearing commenced with Sandie Peggie giving evidence. Dr Beth Upton gave evidence from Thursday 6 February to Wednesday 12 February.

Access to view the hearing remotely was obtainable by sending an email request to [email protected] by 5pm on Wednesday 9 July. Detailed instructions were provided here:

drive.google.com/file/d/16-9POEZ7yHWUr6EmbfquJZO18Gv78bSm/view

The hearing is being live tweeted by x.com/tribunaltweets and there's additional information here: tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/peggie-vs-fife-health-board-and-dr-005. This also has threadreaderapp archives of live-tweeting of the sessions of the hearing for those who can't follow on Twitter, for example: archive.ph/WSSjg.

An alternative to Twitter is to use Nitter: nitter.net/tribunaltweets or nitter.poast.org/tribunaltweets

Links to previous threads #1 to #29 can be found in the header of thread #30.

Thread 30: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5375337-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-30
Thread 31: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5375819-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-31

Dr U's evidence was quite the thing, if you ever have a couple of hours to kill it's well worth a catch up on the TT sub stack.

Someone posted earlier this article about Jane Russell doing a victory gallop through town after being made KC. And I like to imagine she has a stable hand waiting round the side entrance to the court with her trusty steed so she can make a quick getaway if it all gets too much! 😁

https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/barrister-gallops-through-london-celebrate-becoming-kc

Thanks that’s hugely helpful

Isn’t daddy quite high up there.

While I really don't want to tone police is it necessary to go back on the old sexist comments, even as a joke?

You'd have to think JR will be thinking about that. I would in her position. It's not her fault that she's ended up playing the Washington Generals role in all these tribunals, but it can't be something she relishes at the best of times, and sometimes you end up with a client who's just unmanageable.

The question is, which client is more unmanageable?

Re the missing emails, I’m fairly sure the dog ate them.

Placemarking

And this email and related nonsense from KS really pisses me off. We're constantly being told that Drs are our brightest and best, the top 1%, could earn significantly more elsewhere and we should be eternally grateful to them all for deigning to serve the NHS. I'm sure many really are good, work hard and genuinely care. I also know a huge number of people earning significantly less doing equally stressful and valuable jobs, the vast majority of whom would know how to behave should any kind of potential grievance come in their direction and if they didn't know would at least know to find out. It comes off as complete arrogance but I suppose it could just be ignorance.

It wasn't a joke. I was deadly serious. Given everything else that has been revealed about NHS Fife over the last few days, nothing would surprise me. Someone upthread however has suggested her father has a senior position there though so that might account for it.

Oh good, I'm glad it was helpful, I didn't want to sound as if I was batting you away! I try to post requested links when I'm on my laptop but find it not so easy when I'm on my phone.

But, since you showed interest, I will admit to also using the utterly desperate need-to-know-now method sometimes, on my laptop.

If you have wifi settings open in separate fixed window (or equivalent), it is usually possible to see a paywalled news article if you reload the page and then immediately turn off the wifi before the paywall widget loads. The timing can be tricky but I am ashamed and proud in equal measure that I managed to use this method in the early hours of this morning when needing URGENTLY to catch up on the latest headlines. 😳

You will need a Fifer for that, I couldn't begin to don't justice.

I don't know - do you know his surname? I gather Bumba is her married name.

Oh for pity’s sake. I look away for two minutes - two minutes - and you’re on thread 32. Some of us have jobs you know.

Wow. That’s such a great trick. I may need a bigger portaloo 🤣🤣 next week. Thanks Nebulous !!

Brilliant that googling the Information Security chap leads us to this helpful little note of how they minute the Fife Clinical Governance Committee Meetings.

"The minutes were produced from the recording of the meeting, by Hazel Thomson, Board Committee Support Officer, who was not in attendance at the Committee itself."

https://www.nhsfife.org/media/vgghagb3/clinical-governance-committee-meeting-papers-20240301.pdf

We can also see that as of 12 Jan 2024, Fife was struggling to recruit to 'digital roles'.

from item 6.2: "The Information Security Manager provided an update on the work being undertaken to protect NHS Fife from cyber-attacks, as detailed in the paper. It was advised that the work is reported through the Information Governance & Security Group, who report directly into the Committee and the Digital & Information Board.

Questions followed, and it was reported that there are challenges in terms of recruitment and retention into digital roles. It was also reported that the reduced likelihood of the impact of the risk is through having good business continuity and disaster recovery options."

There's a flogging a dead horse joke in there somewhere.

Placemarking. Although it's a bit pointless, considering I can't read fast enough to keep up with the threads😄

And did I read that Sandie is now suing the RCN?

There is suddenly a never-ending scope for court cases!

Seeing the Supreme Court have clarified that numerous people and organisations have been operating outside the law, this could just run and run, forever.

And Sandie Peggie, backed up by Sex Matters, represented by Naomi Cunningham, and possibly financed by J. K. Rowling, would appear to be an almost impossibly perfect person to do it.

The list of people to sue must be getting added to by the second.

We always said this journey was only ever going in one direction, but I'm not sure anyone anticipated quite how unequivocally it would be rammed into hyper drive.

Isla Bumba has two maiden names on Scotland's People - Field and McLeod, I guess her parents didn't marry. There's apparently a McLeod on NHS Fife's board but that doesn't necessarily mean its a parent as its quite a common surname. Some further sleuthing is needed to find the father's name to know for sure, but it would certainly explain a lot about how someone so incompetent, lacking in experience and knowledge could get such a high paid job.

For the love of God, Wims, can you all just pause for ten minutes and give me a chance to catch up?

It's not hard to look IB up at scotlandspeople dot gov dot uk, if anyone feels inclined, but reporting the results might cross a line that MNHQ wouldn't like. I stopped short of paying £12 to buy a copy of her birth certificate.

Or the pony.

She has a dormant account on Twitter as Isla Rose-Marie McLeod so it seems that's the surname she used with pre-marriage.

The sad thing is that I doubt that the casting couch or nepotism were/are required for totally out of their depth people like this to be recruited to those EDI roles - you just need to be able to spout TWAW and wear a rainbow lanyard well.

Have you even met the NHS?! Have you not noticed the incompetence of most of the other NHS Fife people in this case?