NHS Fife tries to silence nurse - Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton - thread #53

[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 was 29 July 2025. It resumed again over 1 to 2 September for closing submissions.

The hearing commenced with Sandie Peggie giving evidence. Dr Beth Upton gave evidence from Thursday 6 February to Wednesday 12 February 2025. Sandie Peggie returned to give more evidence on 29 July 2025.

Access to view the second part of the hearing remotely was obtainable by sending an email request to [email protected].

The hearing was 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 #50 can be found in this thread: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 51: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5402652-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-51 1 September 2025 to 2 September 2025
Thread 52: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5403218-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-52 2 September 2025 to 4 September 2025

Fife disclosed no replies.

But as we were told by JR, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Fife disclosed no replies.

But as we were told, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I thought somebody acknowledged? Not sure.

But if you consider it as parallel to a safety incident - for example spilt liquids on hard floors - anybody there has a responsibility to deal with it. Same with school pupils doing anything unsafe in shared spaces - teacher is not supposed to wander past it whistling like the Duolingo Owl. If you are there when it happens you have a normal duty to deal. Don’t you?

I guess that if you don't respond or don't disclose the responses there is a defense to be made that you just binned it without opening.

Strange that all the recipients may have done this - feels a little bit like collusion

Whatever the likely award, I think we can be sure Sandie will have been made fully aware of the limitations of the ET before the case proceeded. I'm not sure it's a good idea to spend too much time making 'sweepstake' guesses - not because I think that's bad or wrong in any way in itself - but just because I have caught sight of derogatory posts here and there on reddit and twitter,referring to SP as 'money grabbing' and I wouldn't want to exacerbate those (unfounded, spiteful) claims in any way.

The likelihood is that, now almost every Fife witness has behaved atrociously, there will be other quieter compensation settlements to follow, though again limited by what an ET can award.

I hope that serving justice to as many of the involved individuals as possible will bring some peace to Sandie, because that peace is the thing she probably needs for recovery and is something money can't buy. Turning their lives upside down and her own life the right way up is a form of justice, and a massive incentive for senior management across the board to think very carefully before doing anything like this again.

I would love to have heard the wail Kate "You can't prove that" Searle must have let out when she received her own personal set of papers from MG on 6 August. Which arrived within a fortnight of giving evidence under oath that nothing else had been held back from the consultant email chain.

edit
@SlackJawedDisbeliefXY I think there was one reply to KS that NC described as 'mild rebuke'. I think it was Maggie Currer's Foot-in-Mouth email that was said by Fife to have received no replies.

I think there was one reply to KS that NC described as 'mild rebuke'

Yes, that is what I was remembering. There is so much evidence - you need a piece of software that allows you to see everything on a timeline separated by participant with some sort of linkage that shows how all the parts interconnect

Do barristers just rely on the bundle and remembering where everything is?

Send anything to SP via her barrister's chambers or solicitor's office. The hospital are opening her post, as per evidence in the tribunal.

I suspect most doctors get no HR training which is why they rely on the experts so much, hence the poor response by senior medics . Plus in their defence they were doing the correct thing given that NHS guidelines favour trans identities

This is what I don't understand.

No HR staff member would dream of treating a patient because they are not medically trained.

Why the hell do doctors believe that they are better at HR matters? Surely in a large organisation with a large HR team, the first port of call, once DU complained, was HR?

I'm sorry that experience was difficult for you. Do you want to take this further? Then I will contact HR on [first working day after Christmas] and we will work out the next steps.

No mass email to consultants. No assumption that SP we in the wrong. Perfectly sympathetic and professional. And confidential.

I would love to have heard the wail Kate "You can't prove that" Searle must have let out when she received her own personal set of papers from MG on 6 August. Which arrived within a fortnight of giving evidence under oath that nothing else had been held back from the consultant email chain.

I wouldn't have expected the claim against KS to have come out of the blue. Putting KS on notice maybe a week or two beforehand that the claim would be incoming wouldn't be surprising. Which raises the interesting question: were any of KS, MC, or ED aware that things were only just getting starting for them when they were giving evidence?

I may be mistaken here, but I thought that NC requested to add Kate Searle to the list of respondents in this action previously but this was denied.

So starting a separate one must have been on her radar unless she arrogantly thought she'd got away with it.

In another life I worked in a university with a medical school full of people with contempt for other people's expertise. So they drafted their own consent form for medical students to sign when taking each other's blood (because law is so much easier than medicine); this attempted to exclude all liability for any harm caused, but then conceded it completely at the end making it a totally useless exercise. Apparently the students queued for ages to sign this thing before they could begin their attempts. The Law School laughed like drains when they saw it. And all the medics had to do beforehand was ask!

Medics are academically bright, of course, but my subject appears to be, for some of them (including family members), the one they found hardest at school and really had to work at. So I use it as often as I can to combat condescension from consultants, especially male ones.

I may be mistaken here, but I thought that NC requested to add Kate Searle to the list of respondents in this action previously but this was denied.

That's what happened, yes.

I think NHSF not disclosing everything they should have at the start prevented KS being added as a respondent at the beginning. If they had provided everything as they'd been ordered to, SP's side would have realised much sooner that KS should be a respondent.

Hmm, didn't NC remind/warn somebody that there might be further proceedings involving further disclosure, at some point? I can't remember who it was though. At the time, I just thought she was suggesting that there might be an appeal.

@NebulousSupportPostcard
Totally agree Sandie and Backer will be more than aware of the limitations on what the ET is likely to pay out.

Which just adds to my admiration for them both, this isn't about getting a big payout for Sandie this is completely about women's rights and keeping Single Sex Spaces, single sexed!

Oooh, not yet found answer to your qu but it was the J who asked most detailed qus to KS re: search.

23 July pm extract from TT

"J - when searching emails, you said you searched your emails -sent or recieved?
KS - all boxes
J - if it had been deleted part of that
search?
KS - not necessarily, emails are deleted automatically
J - how often
KS after 30 days I think
J - ??
KS - may not have typed in names, on second request were given lots of names to search. Lot of staff and so there's a long list of emails if you just type name
J - that's it
"

The Courier gave a little more detail than TT:
"A large section of the cross-examination of Dr Searle by Ms Peggie focussed on emails and what was disclosed to the tribunal.
The barrister referenced an email involving Dr Searle where the internal investigation is discussed Dr Searle sent to around 19 other colleagues where she recounted the allegations against Ms Peggie.
Ms Cunningham says this email was disclosed late and only after Dr Searle had completed an initial search.
She suggested Dr Searle was either “surprisingly incompetent” in search for relevant documents or intentionally withheld the email.
“Is it the case that you and your colleagues deliberately withheld the ‘foot and mouth disease’ email?”
But Dr Searle denied this, saying she “absolutely” did not intentionally withhold key documents.
"

Why not just say that she thought she had deleted it ….because to claim ( I know it’s not a direct claim but what other inference is there) to have forgotten that she had sent such an email paints her in a worse light. She must have known that the email existed as she wrote it and sent it. This was absolutely a conspiracy between the people on that chain to attempt to not disclose information that would damage their credibility and reputation

Emails are automatically deleted after 30 days?!

No wonder the judge made some gesture or some noise that equates to, "what the fuck are you talking about? This isn't a fucking marketing department. You're a fucking emergency department doctor, probably talking about serious conditions, including avoidable death and critical injuries and conditions, let alone discussing serious management and operational issues, and your emails are automatically deleted? Do you think we are stupid? Or are you that fucking stupid that you should probably not be doing doctoring?"

Or words to that effect.

I think Dr Searle received the “foot in mouth email”, but the other consultant. Dr Searle wrote the 1st email asking everyone to support Upton and burn Sandie.

Found it. It was NC to Maggie Currer on the first session of Tues 29 July.

From TT:

"NC Any replies to email
MC I dont think so
NC You hesitated. Bearing in mind may be more email searches for
more legal action how confident are u?
MC I didnt find a reply"

I think NC has already broached the likelihood of an appeal by the losing party in the previous week but I'm pretty sure she made that first mention to the J around the time they were holding private case management meetings and then discussing issues briefly when they returned to the public hearing. I don't think NC said anything like this until after KS had completed her evidence.

I think when I heard NC say this to MC I believed her to be raising the same issue that she had raised with the J. It's not though, is it? We didn't know what would be happening on Aug 6 but, if NHSFife and the three individuals had received Letters before Claim, then it would have been clearer to MC than to us what "more legal action" meant.

@MyrtleLion my reading of this was about the Deleted folder, and its contents being set to fully delete after 30 days. I'm not sure at all.

I thought the new claim only arose due to evidence that came out during evidence in the main case ie when giving their evidence, they wouldn't know it would lead to further litigation

That makes much more sense.

Most big organisations will have backups if emails are deleted by individual recipients/senders. Or they should have policies about that.