"Darlington Nurses" vs County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust Tribunal Thread

[ThreeWordHarpy]

Five nurses working at Darlington Memorial Hospital have filed a legal case suing their employer, an NHS trust, for sexual harassment and sex discrimination. The nurses object to sharing the women’s changing facilities with a male colleague, “Rose”, who:

• identifies as female
• has not undergone any physical or hormonal transition and has full male genitalia
• has cited inclusivity policies
• is backed by the trust’s HR department
• has been granted access to a single-sex changing room for women.

The NHS trust’s HR department dismissed the nurses’ concerns, stating they should “broaden their mindset” and “be educated”. More details can be found at Sex Matters

The hearing is due to start on October 20th and is scheduled to last 3 weeks. To view the hearing online email: [email protected] [[email protected]] requesting remote access to the case of 2501192/2024 Hutchinson and others Vs County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust, starting 20th October. Also include your full name and your role in the hearing (eg member of the public or observer). Note, it is likely you will need the same full name and email address to log into the hearing, and the name will be visible to other observers.

The hearing will be live tweeted by https://x.com/tribunaltweets. An alternative to Twitter is to use Nitter: nitter.net/tribunaltweets or nitter.poast.org/tribunaltweets. Tribunal Tweets have more background to this case on their substack, including links to their coverage of the earlier hearings.

In earlier hearings reported at http://archive.today/nh5v9, the claimants were supported by the Christian Legal Centre and represented by Pavel Stroilov (solicitor) and Bruno Quentaville (barrister). The respondents were represented by Simon Cheetham KC. We do not know yet if the same representation will be in place for the October hearing

Background information from Christian Concern who are supporting the nurses via the CLC.

I'm back in, well the waiting room at least.

Was anyone running a book on when this would start today? Clearly the last two days weren't quite enough!

Did the court staff have a trial run (no pun intended) and test out the tech before embarking on a four week hearing? The issues must be fundamental to hold things up for this long. They've lost almost half a day with this delay.🙄The cost and waste of time and resources is appalling.

I saw a picture of the nurses walking into court, and it made me feel really emotional.

How have we ended up at a place where nurses have to take legal action to keep a pervy bloke out of their changing rooms? And when they complained, they were told they needed to be re-educated by the person who had been sexually harassing them. It is incomprehensible.

I imagine the tribunal is just in private session, as they were for the first two days.

It's carrying on without us.

My opinion, based only on observing tribunals this year.

It's OK. They're all merging into one. 😵‍💫

KJK said she was going to do a Let Women Speak event outside in solidarity, not sure on what scale.

I’m a nurse and had to share an open plan changing room with a trans identifying man 20 years ago. This has been going on for a long time. I was early 20’s and didn’t know there was anything I could do about it.

its NHS England that made the policy that allowed this to happen.

The message from the clerk in the chat before we all got chucked out was that there were sound issues and that is what TT have been told. I don't think it is in private session in the sense that they are discussing case management issues which are not for public access. The first two days were not private sessions but 'reading days' for the panel to get up to speed on the papers.

https://x.com/ThePosieParker/status/1980953071934120228

there was another message from the clerk saying it's a session for counsel only and she was moving us back to the waiting room.

Thank you. Since the principals are meeting in person, why would sound issues affect them, though?

@MatronPomfrey sorry to hear this. It's surprising and interesting as different places have definately had different rules, even within the NHS.

Ah, that's interesting. I didn't get that. Evidence again that observers in different 'rooms' get different messages.

TT says 1:30 start?

From TT

We've just heard that it's very likely to be a 1.30pm start now.

Is that the male nurse who’s caused all this upset to these poor women?

As always, it’s interesting to note that the supporters on the side of reality openly showing their faces, despite being on the side that suffers consequences for daring to speak up. Compare with TRA supporters who balaclava up and surround themselves with umbrellas and such.

The NHS audit found that there is not one single NHS trust across all of the UK and Ireland that has protected single space provision for patients or staff.

One tra has arrived

@TwoLoonsAndASprout totally agree that this has become the case in recent years but 20 years ago it wasn't across the board.

The wonderful Dawn Furness is interviewing her with Edgeofthematrix (I’m watching on his YouTube)

That orange sign is fantastic!

No fucking about with words there!

Possibly not quite 20 years, but close: the NHS Chief Nursing Officer guidance “Eliminating Mixed Sex Accommodation,” which included Annex E “Delivering same-sex accommodation for trans people and gender variant children” - which (contrary to the “eliminating mixed-sex title”) advocated gender self-id within the NHS - was published in 2009. And the Dept of Health published guidance (mostly written by GIRES) which acted as if self-id was law as early as 2007.

It has been here longer than we think.

Always worth remembering that the sainted NHS was advocating for placing male sex offenders claiming to be women on women's hospital wards back in 2021. I've never been able to get over the fact that nobody in the NHS said, "Hold on a minute, this can't be right" Instead it was waved through in numerous NHS Trusts - which tells us a lot about the type of people employed in senior positions in the NHS

www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/trans-sex-offenders-can-go-on-womens-wards-hospitals-advise-0fmbhm3bn