NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #33

[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 and tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/peggie-vs-fife-health-board-and-dr-bd6. 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
Thread 32: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5376072-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-32

I've paid a pound for 3 months access. I figured I'm going to be reading their stuff a LOT.
The article is dynamite.

Good sleuthing. I clearly haven’t got as much patience as you I didn’t go back as far as 2009. So heres the plan from @anyolddinosaur s link. I can’t find a locker room. There’s a staff room with a sink. There’s a nice big security office ( lucky them). Any one spot a staff locker/ changing room. Or just a room labelled Beth’s would suffice 🤣

And I've finally caught back up with the thread. I need to get stuff done this week. I think I'll need to lock my phone away

We knew back in February that KS had emailed the consultant group in support of DU because knowledge of the letter’s existence prompted the failed application to have her added as a respondent. How much did we (or SP’s team) know about the letter before it was revealed in this round of discovery, its precise contents were revealed on Friday?

People complained to the GMC after the first tranche of the tribunal and I think the GMC said they couldn't do anything whilst the tribunal was ongoing.

iirc HR weren't impressed as things were being done/said without their involvement and then it became too late.

As a consultant who has been a manager, I can confirm you get exactly zero training in management and HR for these roles.

To interview, you have to have done Equality and Diversity. Which is a brief bit of e-learning.

To supervise junior doctors you have to have done Educational Supervisor training. This is very different to being a line manager. It's all about how to give feedback in a caring way, checking they are working through their training portfolio and making sure you and they know how to access support if they are struggling.

A huge difference to when I was a junior doctor and if you were struggling, it was because you were crap.

I fell foul of this when I had a junior dr who couldn't finish her work on time. I knew it was perfectly possible to finish on time as every other doctor for years had done so, the issue was she couldn't make a decision to save her life. When I tried to get her to sort this out she accused me of bullying, I had to apologise and TBH I gave up after that.

THIS^
IN GREAT BIG CAPITAL LETTERS WITH FLASHING LIGHTS

@Futurehappiness Kate Searle qualified in 2004. She's Deputy Clinical Lead, Patient Safety lead, workforce lead. She was upton's clinical supervisor and I think had wider training responsibilities but cant find the reference. Yes she really should have known better, which makes me wonder just what Upton had done about his little problem in F1.

When HR got involved (it was Christmas remember) there was some sensible questioning that seems to have been ignored.

He may have retreated in his position in the presence of the Fife IX in 2024 but on 11 Feb 2025 in cross-exam, he was still adamant that the incidents happened, eg extract re:allegation of SP walking out on resus patient because BU was present. It was only Sandie's internal Fife disciplinary hearing that was delayed. The Fife IX meetings took place from May 2024, but the disclosure of documents was piecemeal until after the Feb adjournment of tribunal.

DU no I recall working with SP on one patient but don't recall working with SP on peanut patient
NC but rare for you to work with SP?
DU fairly rare but higher stress situation so awareness was altered
NC would not have been difficult for board to come up with complete list of shared shifts - could just be one?
DU yes but shift information is private information of claimant
NC you're making this up as you go along Dr Upton?
DU No
NC what really happened is you did work with SP on snickers bar patient. You have made up the allegation that she abandoned that patient in order to leave the room because she couldn't bear to work with you
NC you deliberately failed to give the Board best info about this date because you had your phone notes, even if you couldn't remember halloween. I'm suggesting you made this up and kept date range vague to stop it being checked
DU no not true at all
DU I'm not in the habit of making up lies about my colleagues. I record things that happen to me if they feel unusual so that I can feel safe. They are my interpretations of these events. thats all I can speak to

The utter incompetence (or corruption?) of the whole of NHSF management has been laid bare by this case.

And the scandal is that NHSF is not alone in this level of utter uncompetence that is being funded by tax payers. The rot is deep.

I am not clear on the date of the document in the bundle. His retreat may have come after the cross examination.

Found it. Male and female lockers next to each other. You’d feel quite trapped in such a small room with the door in one corner. It’s near other larger store rooms etc which could be changed to be mixed and / or individual changing spaces. Fife obviously haven't bothered to look at any of this though.

Room size approx 2m x 3.7/4m.

I am finding this discussion of delusion/reality interesting.

Because however much anyone says ‘transwomen are women’ or ‘I am biological and I am not a man so therefore I am a biological woman’ or similar, it isn’t delusional, is it? I mean, I don’t think transwomen actually believe, for example, that they have a uterus? They know they are male. By ‘transwomen are women’ they mean ‘you must define the word woman so that it includes transwomen’. The ideology, as I understand it, is more about control of reality rather than actual delusion.

@RedToothBrush
very interesting thanks.

where to the liberal left males fit into this?
im most shocked/upset by their ardent defence of TW at the expense of women - and I still can’t quite understand why. Would love to hear your thoughts

https://archive.ph/ouEIm
(forgot to paste link)

That was very, very much a banned term until recently on this board (which is subject to a board specific set of guidelines) so many of us are used to avoiding it.

Agree it's a better term though.

@DrPrunesqualer In this many years there may have been changes but it was the best I could find.

Personally when I knew I would have staff to manage I didnt wait for any management training, I got some books and educated myself. Being fair to both parties to a dispute and speaking to both of them before you fire off emails really isnt rocket science.

They know they don’t have a uterus. The only way to square that with “being a woman” is to redefine woman so that having the kind of body that has a uterus isn’t a factor any more.

That underpins the reason why every effort to have keep kind of biological definition of woman must be made to fail. Back to JKR’s “there used to be a word for that”. It’s defining that that kind of bio-talk is left behind. It’s best for them if there isn’t a category word for what used to be women any more. Hence pregnant people, uterus-havers, menstruators etc.

Bit of a cheek for Kate Searle to say in her email that "Beth knows we all support her and condemn the actions of Sandie".

Unlikely she has asked for or knows the views on the matter of all consultants cc'd in.

Ok last of my posts about planning but given the higher number of female staff working for the nhs what utter prat decided this disparity in the changing room sizes in the basement was in any way justified.

It's a performance that requires everyone else to play along. So yes, it has to be about control of reality.

People can believe all kinds of strange things. Theodore Dalrymple says he once had two patients on his ward who both thought they were Haile Selassie, and they were very cogent when explaining how the other guy was delusional.

But if I believe I'm Haile Selassie, that doesn't require everyone I meet to declare that I am actually Jah Rastafari, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. I could just be secretly Haile Selassie and the muggles aren't able to recognise it.

The thing about the trans immersive fantasy is that it requires everyone else to buy in, or pretend that they do. Hence all the stuff about pronouns, trying to control how people refer to you when you aren't there. Any sign that someone disbelieves that you're really a woman will deflate your whole bubble. I think that's a big reason for the extreme anger at those awkward women who won't play along. Why you get the overblown statements about misgendering being equivalent to wishing someone dead.

This doesn't apply to the sensible trans people who will say, "look, I know I'm male, I just feel more comfortable presenting in a female persona", but they seem to be the minority these days.

The comments under the Herald article are great. I'm sure they are very different over in the parallel universe that is the trans sub Reddit, but out in the real world, people are really behind SP. I am still staggered at how NHS Fife have treated her.

@MyAmpleSheep SP's team must have known when they applied to add Searle as a respondent. The rest of knew it must be pretty bad but not what it said until Maya put it on twitter.

This is one of my biggest concerns from the evidence of Dr Upton (and believe me, there's a long list of concerns). He's openly said that he would treat a female patient who openly said they wanted single sex care until they objected (or words to that effect). I'm sure there's many patients in psychiatry or A and E or other parts of the Hospital who are not capable of objecting due to their condition or state. And that I found really unnerving. From that perspective, that surely has to be investigated...........as well as all the other stuff!