"Darlington Nurses" vs County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust Tribunal Thread 2

[ThreeWordHarpy]

Link to Thread 1, 7-Oct to 23-Oct; pre-hearing discussion, evidence from KD (Day 1) and BH (Day 2).

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. 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 and at Christian Concern who are supporting the nurses via the CLC.

The hearing started on October 20th, with evidence starting on October 22nd and is scheduled to last 3 weeks. To view the hearing online, requests for access had to be made by October 17th. The hearing is being live tweeted by Tribunal Tweets who have background to this case on their substack. An alternative to X is to use Nitter: nitter.net/tribunaltweets or nitter.poast.org/tribunaltweets

The Judge made clear at the start of the public hearing on Day 1 that only TT or press have permission to tweet. If online observers see/hear something in the court that isn’t reported by TT, we don’t mention it until the next time there’s a break. This is a very cautious approach to avoid any accusations of “live reporting” on MN. Commentary on the content of TT tweets is fine as soon as they’re posted on X.

Key people:
C/Ns - Claimants, the Darlington nurses
R/T/Trust - Respondent, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust
J/EJ – Judge/Employment Judge
NF - Niazi Fetto KC, barrister for claimants
SC - Simon Cheetham, KC, barrister for respondents
RH - Rose Henderson, trans identifying nurse
CG – Clare Gregory, ward manager
KD – Karen Danson, first claimant to give evidence.
BH – Bethany Hutchison, second claimant to give evidence
AH – Alistair Hutchison, husband of Bethany

Other abbreviations:
WFTCHTJ – Waiting For The Conference Host To Join
ET - Employment Tribunal
DMH/H – Hospital, Darlington Memorial Hospital
CR/CF - changing room or facilities
IX - internal investigation
XX – cross examination

I thought it was 'witness order' as in the order of witnesses rather than compelling a witness or witnesses to attend.

Imagine if it's RH who's been trying to get out of it but is made to appear.

Good point critical it could be that

I hope they get a decent expert witness who has to hand:
-crime stats men/women/trans %
-sexual assaults in changing villages versus single sex changing in pools
-workforce demographic for Darlington Trust and trans % for the unitary authority/county
-Demographic of offenders in prison as % of population
I could go on.

With Sandie in their Union and supporting them in person I suspect they have had some good advice about who to ask to give evidence.

It is disappointing that it is an all male cohort of solicitors, counsel and panel trying to understand the discomfort of a group of nurses.

Although why would they do the order of witnesses appearance behind closed doors.

Maybe there are requests for timing that touch on personal matters and so not suitable for public dissemination?

I wish the witness had referred back to that line when asked to agree that the trust were attempting to resolve the matter. The comment by the HR woman could quite reasonably have been interpreted as her being on Rose’s side or even just an indication that HR didn’t see what the problem was. The HR rep had no reason to mention her own personal views. But in doing potentially sent a strong signal to the other women.

I don't think it has been. There was a ref to nurses in surgical dept talking to other nurses and handovers between departments, but I think that was only discussions about Rose using the changing room, details of who Rose was, and possibly who needed to be where and therefore whether Rose had a valid reason to be in the various places he kept randomly turning up.

First availability of witnesses may involve personal matters and secondly counsel may have reasons for wanting to question witnesses in a particular order which they don't want publicly disclosed.

Has anyone observing been able to see the other panel members? At one point TT reported that the judge asked someone to show a floorplan to a Mrs Newry - is she a panel member? If so there may be hope.....

I suppose i was looking for excitement where there is none.

I think it will become more erm interesting next week. I mean defence witnesses being put through a grilling by the claimants counsel, just to assuage our rage.

In terms of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, these are the first lines about exposure and voyeurism:

66Exposure
F1(1)A person commits an offence if—
(a)he intentionally exposes his genitals, and
(b)he intends that someone will see them and be caused alarm or distress.

67Voyeurism
F1(1)A person commits an offence if—
(a)for the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification, he observes another person doing a private act, and
(b)he knows that the other person does not consent to being observed for his sexual gratification.

Are the hospital liable for enabling at least 66b? The women were obviously caused alarm and distress. Changing rooms are for the private act of removing clothes.

Nope. There's an occasional glimpse of a woman's hand at a screen facing the lawyers but I think that's a clerk.

I fail to say how the repeated questions about Rose's boxers and the state of them advances the defence's case at all.

MSN hdad another report, from GB News, up during the day. It's getting more exposure.

At least we know that sex being a nebulous dogwhistle extends beyond the walls of Fife. No woman is safe.

was it HR woman who said she'd been in the army[

because i was in the army, and unless we were on operations and there was zero other way, we were absolutely forbidden under pain of expulsion from the military, of being anywhere near the accommodation or changing rooms of the opposite sex. (mind you, in my day the lesbians were all kicked out, and we see how that has panned out)

Thank you @MyrtleLion for your excellent work giving us the TT feed. Glad you are home and home you feel loads better soon.

Reading the posts it seems like SC is misgendering/correctly sexing Rose rather a lot

I see the “Emma Watson” argument of “It wouldn’t bother me” in the same light as abortion.

Most women are horrified about abortion, or wouldn’t even think of having one. But all women I have spoken say they can’t make that decision for another woman.

Men changing in women’s single sex spaces is the same. You might be OK with it (though I guarantee they are only thinking of gay men) but you cannot make that decision for another woman.

To be clear women were not consulted about toilets, changing rooms, sports etc….

Karen approached the theatre manager and explained the situation, the legal case and how Rose’s involvement would be “completely inappropriate”, and that she wanted women involved in the operation.
Astonishingly the theatre manager said: “But Rose is a woman”.
She added that she thought Karen was being “prejudiced”.

The theatre manager saw Karen's body as an experience to provide to a man to pat his ego, while signalling to others for social status about how very lovely and open minded she was. All those lovely ego pats and feelz about how nice to be nice.

And there was that Karen not being a willing sacrifice. Her lack of consent and even her distress wasn't enough for the woman to pause.

This is why women need rights. Still. In 2025. Because misogyny is rife, and the servers of it can be absolute twats to women in the name of the patriarchy. What is more patriarchal than being able to coerce a whole room full of women into loudly pretending to you that they believe that you're a woman, and look, they're believing so hard like good girls that they'll expose a non consenting colleague's vagina to you.

I may prove to be completely wrong, but I'm not making any assumptions about the men's inability to understand/empathise with the nurses.

Also, KD's operation - this could all come out with other witnesses. I would be delighted if the theatre manager was thoroughly questioned about RH's involvement. If that's the case, KD having to answer questions about it would perhaps be unnecessary?

Thanks for the TT reports. My stream/room lost sound around 3pm, and after being kicked back to WFTCHTJ I just logged off and gave up on the last hour.

I would like to think that the judges know that the witnesses are lay-people who don't deal with the intricacies of employment law on a daily basis. Grievance and disciplinary procedures are dense, often poorly written, and often held across multiple different policy documents which are held on a poorly designed staff intranet. Most people just aren't familiar with the processes because they have no need to be. I'm quite sure when these women received letters from their employer they assumed the worst, because why else would they write to you? Any letter, but particularly one that mentions potential disciplinary action, would be concerning!

I'm not sure who it was, but one of the ladies responded to questions about how receiving the letter from her employer made her feel along the lines of "I don't know, I'm not sure, I'm a nurse, I don't deal with this", which was spot on.

And when someone says in effect but if you don't let him in the room to see your exposed vagina while you're unconscious and at your most vulnerable, he will be upset at the implication that you think he's not a proper woman who's entitled to this experience - and actually expect this to make the woman surrender to him?

I think right. Fuck pronouns, fuck any of this and fuck third spaces. It's the gateway to this kind of absolutely unacceptability.

I think all of them so far have said either that they approached a manager, or that they were part of a group with a spokeswoman who approached a manager on their behalf to avoid an overwhelming number of complaints.

This is a totally reasonable thing to do - if you have a work problem, you speak to your line manager first. If the manager didn't direct them to the correct grievance and resolution procedures and help them make the complaint in the proper way, that's a management failure.

This site is so crap the pages keep reloading and I lost a long post I was just finishing.

Start again.

There are several aspects that concern me:

• The letter the Trust sent sounds bog standard. I know it can be scary to get letters like that but it’s not harassment.
• I really hope at least one witness was told directly by RH they were trying for a baby. If not that is potentially harassment/bullying of RH particularly putting it in the public domain.
• Going to the media after being told to keep it confidential may depend on timing. If it happened whilst the investigation was ongoing and they hadn’t tried official whistle blowing routes that’s not good.
• I know their TU wouldn’t represent them and they weren’t allowed a solicitor but they should have engaged more with the resolution process. Take a bloody good note taker to challenge any inaccuracies in write ups.

Positives are:

• witnesses are all uncomfortable with RH in the CR
• the length of time to do the investigation
• the length of time the Trust took to finally give RH their own CR.