NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #38

[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
Thread 33: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5376608-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-33
Thread 34: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5377387-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-34
Thread 35: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5377598-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-35
Thread 36 mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5378031-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-36
Thread 37: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5378200-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-37

Pete has had a couple of days aff, is it time for him to get dragged out his pit?

@Totallygripped Someone who says they are attending the tribunal in person has noted on twitter that 1000+ new documents came in after the Judge's last order and warning.

I'm guessing the team will have been ready to drill down into exactly the place that they identified a gap in February, so if Fife by any chance hoped to overwhelm them with minutiae, then there is something else to add to the Board Reflective Practice Discussion. 😁

Where are those intersectional politics of class and sex that the self-identified "progressives" like to bang on about, when you need them?

This has been said before but as I understand it an apparently imcomplete email chain between a groujp of people involved at NHSF was handed over to the Claimant, the single email was also handed over, but at a remove of a couple of months, and NC and her team have put them together and are arguing that they are part of a common email chain with, I think, the single email being the first email that originated the email chain.

It is this connection that KS challenged NC to prove. The importance is that if NC is right, then the separation of the single email from its chain by a number of members of the group shows collusion to withhold highly significant evidence from the Claimant when NHSF and the people were involved were under a court order to provide it.

The single email is pretty incriminating describing how the group involved in the email chain knew they shouldn't be in a group together over the SP matter, and that they had to keep their working together a secret. I think snippets of the single email were read out by NC and were not good at all for NHSF and the people in the group.

Not worth trying to battle it out over the article atm, but SingleSexSpacesInSchools makes the very good suggestion to put it in the (separate) Talk page, where it wont get Reverted or deleted, & will help to build 'consensus' if people decide to take it on.

I believe Dr Upton's Mum is a chaplain and his step-father a bishop. His father's family are academics. A lot of local connections.

What it brought to my mind was 'we didn’t burn him!'! as blurted out by Tubbs in the League of Gentlemen.

I really don’t know why anyone’s surprised at the doctors having 100% loyalty to each other. This isnt unique to this case. It what happens every single time there’s a complaint against a doctor.

And they support him transing??

And KS had worked with SP for nine years!

Most churches are up into their necks in gender ideology.

As someone else pointed out NC doesn’t really have to prove it. The testimony leaves enough room for that panel to make an inference, I think. That being said, there is an expert on the witness list so I imagine they will testify about Re: to confirm NCs line of argument.

It’s sadly no surprise to a lot of staff nurses that some consultants/ medics still barely register them as colleagues. The consultants I work with are all nice, empathetic and highly competent. Do they club together to get the nurses who work long hours to deliver the treatment they prescribe so much as a communal box of doughnuts over Christmas? They do not.
Do all the JDs on 4 month placements get a bottle of wine and a little handwritten card thanking them for their hard work each? ‘Course they do.

A lot of the stuff Fife are introducing is indeed irrelevant. But it isn't enough to show that Fife broke the law by failing to provide a single sex changing room. SP has to show that she suffered detriments due to speaking up about it and that the detriments were unjustified. All the stuff about her alleged racist views, etc. is part of Fife's attempt to justify their actions. And we know JR intends to argue that Fife don't have to provide single sex changing rooms - that the Supreme Court judgement was just about representation on certain public bodies and has nothing to do with changing rooms.

Remote observers are being let in by the conference host. Blank screen so far from the court.

Im sure god is thrilled with this 🙄🤣

Did she really say exactly this? Or did TT not hear “ 2 X chromosomes”. Anyone there who can confirm?

Morning all!
Here's the herald Scotland blog from this morning - it summarises events so far! I am in and out today so won't be able to post it most of the day -maybe someone else can? (If not I will do the bits I am home for )

10:21am
We have been live blogging the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal since it resumed last Wednesday.
Catch up on each day's coverage here:
Wednesday: Isla Bumba, NHS Fife's equality lead
Thursday: Gillian Malone, head of nursing
Friday: Espeth Pitt, consultant in emergency medicine and Louise Curran, senior charge nurse
Monday: Lottie Myles, service manager at NHS Fife
Tuesday: Dr Kate Searle, emergency medicine consultant and Dr Upton's line manager
9:22am
Meanwhile, catch up on the key details from Dr Searle's evidence yesterday.
The Herald's exclusive search of the evidence bundles in this case revealed that Dr Upton was offered gender neutral toilets at Victoria Hospital - but this was rejected as the medic was comfortable using the female changing rooms.
Dr Searle, who is the junior medic's supervisor, also told the tribunal that the comparison to Isla Bryson, a rapist who was placed in a female prison estate after transitioning, was "extremely offensive".
This is what you may have missed from yesterday's hearing: Key points in Sandie Peggie and NHS Fife employment tribunal
9:16am
Good morning. We are back for another important day in the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal against NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton.
Dr Kate Searle, an emergency medicine consultant at the Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy continues her evidence.
She is Dr Upton's line manager and played a crucial role in the reporting of the Christmas Eve incident with Ms Peggie.
In yesterday's session, we had got up to the cross-examination stage, with Naomi Cunningham, acting for Ms Peggie, quizzing Dr Searle on an email she sent to 19 other consultants.
Dr Searle's role was crucial. We heard yesterday that she had agreed Dr Upton had the right to use the female changing rooms upon taking the job at the hospital.
She was informed of the incident with Ms Peggie in the early hours of Christmas Day and suggested that Dr Upton consider reporting it "hate incident" to the police.
We will then hear from Dr Maggie Currer, who is also an emergency medicine consultant.
Importantly, proceedings today do not get underway until at least 11.30am

I've been surprised at some of the apparently sensible people who appear to have gone full-on TRA when their adolescent children have announced that they're transing.

Unless the doctor is a member of an out group. I’m slightly surprised that being trans is the most “in” of in groups though. When did that happen?

Right. That was my understanding too.

NC is arguing the single email was part of the chain (don't talk about this, foot in mouth etc) and was deliberately removed. Hiding damning evidence.

It was disclosed/discovered when the judge ordered in April but KS is saying it isn't part of that chain and doesn't think that NC can prove that it is.

There isn't a missing email yet to be found.

Think I've got it now.

Only from memory but I think it was a mix of what TT wrote and what you said. I thought I heard "2 sets of chromosomes" but I wasn't sure what that meant and then got caught up with the next part of the cross exam.

It seems sort of apt.

An unverifiable belief system. And the whole TWATW / TWAW debate bears some resemblance to the consubstantiation / transsubstantiation schism.

For a 'quick format' (or corruption) on any kind of disk, some free or cheap "undelete" software can recover most or all of the files, depending on what has happened after the format.

A curious thing about magnetic media is that if you go deep into the physical ferromagnetic layer, it's possible to determine both what is there now, and what was there before (as in you can in some cases see previous data that has actually been overwritten). A binary 1-was-0 is distinguishable from a 1-was-1, if you look closely enough.

This is not something you can do with a bit of freeware on your laptop, you need a clean room to disassemble the HD and extremely expensive equipment to read the platters and analyse the images. This is MI6 or Serious Organised Crime level stuff.

Modern file scrubbing software takes that into account and writes over the binary bits multiple times, hopefully thwarting any reliable analysis of the historic state of the bit.

So there are 2 main issues here

1. That witnesses colluded in emails to talk to each other about the case

1. They deliberately tried to hide the evidence of their collusion by removing this particular email from the chain supplied in the initial disclosure of documents.