NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #42

[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 #40 can be found in this thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 41: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379334-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-41 24 July 2025 to 25 July 2025

Did JR not know why C cancelled the exam of the phone? Cus by opening the question, she’s just made her own client look slippery as f.

But she can only act for both so long as there is no conflict. If Fife in good faith relied on Upton’s screenshots as contemporaneous, and the evidence shows that Upton’s screenshots are not contemporaneous, but he tampered with them after the event (which is Jb’s evidence, the judge will have to make a finding about that), then that opens a conflict.

I have just realised that this was SPs witness and in Scot’s ET there is evidence in chief so JR was not re-X but XX. So she had no option to sit down and shut up really, she had to XX or be deemed to have accepted his evidence. so ignore my previous posts about that!

That's the basics, he also sent over a screen shot where dates were altered by superimposing new ones on top.

"Allegedly"

It appears that DU edited the notes a lot and fudged the dates to make them appear contemporaneous when not

I'm not sure either if he ever got details of DrU's phone so he could prep for the meeting, but CE succeeded in answering JR's statement that the meeting was postponed by SP's side, by pointing out that it was only cancelled because NHSF side hadn't facilitated JB doing his prep.

I think fundamentally it was that time-stamps on notes were screwed up, there was no way to reproduce such odd time-stamps, but the only explanation JB could come up with would be monkey business having been carried out on Upton's phone or on the screenshots produced by Upton of the notes.

They could only do that if Upton had handed it over for examination. From the evidence today, it appears he realised that would be dangerous so retracted his previous agreement to do so and tried to manipulate the evidence. He thought that JB wouldn't be able to catch him out. He was wrong.

The judge doesn't think an employment tribunal has the power to do that.

Is MC the last witness or will there be more on Monday?

Do we want to take bets that if the forensics guy had been able to access the actual phone there would be a whole lot of messages from DUs friends instructing him how to delete and change dates of files

God I picked the wrong day to embark on a digital detox. I've been scrolling like Billio.
JR hasn't been ambushed with this evidence. She must have had sight of it before today so if that's all she's got, they are toast.
There's now a clear conflict of interest between her clients. Ironically if there had been a proper investigation of the Upton/Peggie dispute that hadn't been completely in thrall to the trans side (no debate after all), Upton's account might have been properly tested.
DU astonishingly naive if he thought this would wash. I think the police wiped the smirk of Harold Shipman's face when they were able to show he had retrospectively altered patients' notes to hide his nefarious activities.
You can't outGoogle Google.
I suppose JR could always recall DU to give an account of what the dog did to his homework.

Hehe 😁

https://x.com/Jebadoo2/status/1948658672852209959

Fife's witness could not explain the weird timestamps either but "trusted Beth"

I think what he's saying is he couldn't find any way in the Google Keep app to create a version history with dates in the wrong order, as Upton's screenshot showed. He tried putting phone in airplane mode, setting date and time back, but Google recorded in the version history the time the note was uploaded from the app to its servers. This could mean the screenshot was tampered with.

I don’t know about Scotland but an ET in England could not. He can, however, draw adverse inferences from Upton’s refusal to provide his phone for proper forensic examination.

I would have expected that in the background JR had suggestd to NHSF to authorise getting in a heavy-duty IT forensics expert and that wasn't agreed to.

So what we have learnt so far today is

NHS Fife's IT guy is so lazy he didn't actually do any work. He just got Dr Upton to do it for him and he had a quick look and went yep good stuff. Cos doctors are all trustworthy. And NHS Fife didn't think that it was a massive problem to let this guy in the witness box for them, when it was clear he'd actually done fuck all.

Then we learnt that Dr Uptons notes don't even match the recollection and testimony given in the witness box. He calls her behaviour 'weird'. He doesn't say he's upset or distressed by it. It's almost like someone came along later and said that a terrible hate crime had happened and he should cry. Even the incident in the changing room sounds reasonable in his own words!

Then we have the forensics guy come along and say the notes were amended at a later date and there's a doctored picture which has been superimposed. Thus further drawing into question Dr Upton's creditably.

And then finally in a bizarre and utterly unprofessional act of what must be complete desperation the defence lawyer starts on the forensics guy and suggests he's been paid to deliberately find that Dr Upton is lying!

It's utterly bonkers.

Dr Upton's own notes make him look like he and his cronies all exaggerated and wound each other after the fact! No need for the forensics guy to lie on top of that. Even if the notes hadn't have been edited they still don't exactly support what's been said in the witness box and the certainly don't appear to be sufficient justification for the non policy aligned and non HR approved treatment of Sandie Peggie.

And all along NHS Fife have gone along with this and thought 'ooo poor Dr Upton we need to stand by him and trust him completely and utterly without understanding the law or listening to HR'.

It's amazing.

Love Dennis.

Exclamation marks are violence

Ah god I've missed almost a whole thread! Can i thank the person who uploaded the whole of DrUs notes about the Sandie changing room incident.

Even in his notes I found her request very reasonable, she was intimidated, she had bad history with men, she was uncomfortable, she says intimidated a few times, doesn't sound like she shouted. How could he not hear what she was asking? And definitely proves she doesn't say anything about big Isla Bryson the rapist, he infers that, it's there in his notes.

Her request was please leave, I'm intimidated,, others have been too, they aren't willing to speak up, I've had bad history with men, please leave. He really has no empathy does he????

I think - and someone please correct me if I’m wrong - that the forensic chap found that a) there’d been an attempt to deliberately manipulate the time/date stamps on notes and that b) screenshots had been overlaid with other text then re-screenshotted, akin to printing something out, putting another piece of paper with different text over part of it, then photographing it.

Maybe there are other explanations for the weird version history though. It could be that there used to be some way of having disordered dates in there but it was a bug in the app that Google has now fixed. Or it could be that the forensics guy didn't come across how this might happen with his investigation.

@anyolddinosaur This was a few years ago and I’ve since retired so don’t have to put up with that crap anymore (public sector, totally captured). Said TIM is still forcing his way unwanted into women’s spaces - top billing at an International Women’s Day poetry event where he indulged his menstruation fetish wittering on about bleeding from his whole soul.

@RedToothBrush thanks for summary as had to work today and was trying to workout what batshittery had happened today

In fairness to the Fife IT guy he asked if he.could do a forensic search.and Fife said no