Bosses at Matt Hancock’s local hospital have been severely criticised in an NHS report for their part in an “intimidating” bullying scandal exposed by the Guardian. The long-delayed review into West Suffolk hospital in Bury St Edmunds was ordered in January 2020 after the Guardian revealed that senior clinicians were subjected to an unprecedented demand to provide fingerprint samples as part of a management search for a suspected whistleblower. A scathing 226-page report, by Christine Outram, chair of the Christie NHS foundation trust, found this tactic was “extremely ill-judged” and had a “disastrous” impact on staff morale and the reputation of the trust. The independent report published by NHS England on Thursday criticised the current chair of the trust, Sheila Childerhouse, and the senior management team, who have all since left, for having insufficient regard for patient safety and discouraging staff from raising concerns. Outram found that trouble began when a consultant anaesthetist doctor was seen injecting himself with drugs in November 2017, prompting some of his senior colleagues to raise the alarm. But she said these concerns were dismissed by the then medical director, Nick Jenkins, and the then director of workforce and communications, Jan Bloomfield, who allowed the doctor to carry on working as he continued to self-medicate. The report said it was “extraordinary” that concerns about the doctor were “ignored and rejected” by management. An anaesthetist, referred to in the report as Dr C, and known to be Dr Patricia Mills, was so concerned about the handling of the issues that she emailed Childerhouse “in confidence”. Instead of taking up the concerns, Mills’ email was simply forwarded to trust’s chief executive, Steve Dunn, who, with Bloomfield, summoned Mills to complain about her behaviour and accused her of trying to undermine the medical director. Outram said Childerhouse should have listened to Mills’ concerns and raised them with executives herself. Instead, she said: “The CEO [Dunn] and DWC [Bloomfield] quite wrongly mingled Dr C’s attempt to speak up with an attempt to address their perceptions about conduct.” Problems escalated when the self-injecting doctor was involved in the treatment of Susan Warby, who died in August 2018 after an operation at the hospital, which is in the constituency of the former health secretary, Hancock. An anonymous letter sent to Warby’s husband highlighted errors in her treatment. Outram said that rather than seeing the incident as a “red flag event” about patient safety, the trust’s executives saw it as a “malicious” attempt to undermine colleagues and launched a “highly flawed investigation” to find the culprit. She found that managers eventually whittled the number of suspects down to four, all of whom had raised concerns about the self-injecting doctor, including Mills. All felt “victimised”, Outram noted. They were then sent requests by management for fingerprints with a warning that failure to do so “implicates you as being involved in writing the letter”. The report said this “flawed and intimidating process damaged individual staff members and went against any semblance of an open culture in which staff were free to raise concerns”. It added: “The impact of these actions was nothing short of disastrous, not only for the staff directly caught up in the process, but for other members of the trust’s staff, the working environment more generally, and for the trust’s reputation internally and externally.” The incident contributed to the hospital in January 2020 becoming the first to be relegated by Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspectors from “outstanding” to “requires improvement”. Outram criticised the trust for failing to ask why the anonymous letter had been sent and instead focusing on who sent it. She urged it and other trusts to be “avoid jumping to any conclusions that an individual raising concerns is simply making trouble”. The trust said it took full responsibility for the failings and apologised to the staff involved. There has already been a management clear-out at the trust in advance of the report’s publication. Dunn, described as a “brilliant leader” by Hancock when he was health secretary, resigned in July. Jenkins stepped down in April, and its former chief operating officer, Helen Beck, also criticised in the report, retired last month. Bloomfield retired in March 2019. Craig Black, the trust’s interim chief executive, said: “We take full responsibility for failings and shortcomings around the handling of events leading up to and surrounding the whistleblowing and are truly sorry to the staff and families affected. “All our staff should feel confident to speak up without fear of retribution. We will use this report to make further changes to continue our work to create an open, fair and inclusive organisation that puts our staff and patient safety front and centre.” Dr Jenny Vaughan, chair of the Doctors’ Association, said: “Directors made the decision to focus all energies on the pursuit of the whistleblower – someone trying to speak up to raise the alarm. “It’s absolutely crucial that staff feel able to raise concerns without feeling bullied or intimidated, as that’s much safer for patients. Unfortunately, what happened here was the opposite.”