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Top Doc Says Complaining Patients Seek Petty Glory The Medical Director of Medway Teaching Primary Care Trust was engulfed in controversy last week when it emerged that he had dismissed patients' complaints as a quest for "petty glory". Dr Tim Woodman's astonishing outburst, made in a doctors-only Internet chat room on the 8th December 2003, was not limited to patients' complaints. He said," On one occasion as MD I apologised to a GP who perceived that he had been wronged and he spent weeks crowing about 'beating the PCT'. Patients are liable to do the same but my attitude now is 'let them have their petty glory'." In another message written on the same day, he went on to advise his colleagues on how best to dodge complaints. He said, "If it is possible to apologise without admitting liability I would always suggest you do so," adding, "what you are apologising for is any distress / misunderstanding - not any negligence or bad attitude." Dr Woodman, of Gillingham, Kent, graduated from St George's Hospital Medical School in 1981, and works both as Medway Teaching Primary Care Trust's Medical Director and as a GP. Of his post with Medway PCT, Dr Woodman recently said, "Part of my role is to oversee the management of poorly performing doctors." The exact way in which Dr Woodman manages these doctors was unclear at the time of writing. However, in advocating apology as a means of defusing complaints, he went on to say that, in his role as Medical Director, he had seen several complaints, "which went totally pear-shaped simply because the GP was in a stubborn mood." He added, "There are better things to die in a ditch for." Although Dr Woodman did not give details of these complaints, he appeared to be suggesting that the GPs in question had fallen foul of patients' complaints because they had been unwilling to offer an apology. He did not specify whether he believed that their conduct had in any way warranted such an apology, or whether he simply believed than their apology would have deflected the complaints brought against them. In an earlier message, written on the 19th November 2003, Dr Woodman confessed to having himself been the subject of two official complaints, "with a 50:50 split result!" He said, "For the two years that each took to sort out I found life hell." Speaking of a complaint against him that was dismissed, he added, "When the complaint is thrown out (and thrown out again after the patient appeals) you can't even go round and burn his house down!" Dr Woodman's inflammatory comments were made on a web site accessible only to registered doctors. Both the site and its members are fiercely protective of this exclusivity, and some members, including Dr Woodman, have raised fears that messages posted in its chat rooms may become available to the general public. In a message dated 21st November 2003, Dr Woodman accused the satirical magazine, Private Eye, of reproducing verbatim "a response from an A&E" doc in the web site's news page. He went on to add that "many of us will expound thoughts [on the web site] that we would never dream of placing on public record, and the piece in Private Eye was a case in point, as it could conceivably lead to a complaint against the Glasgow ambulance service if nothing else." Dr Woodman was concerned, he said, that, "it could be possible to identify some of the docs involved and that this is yet another erosion of the security of [the web site] as a place where we can be informal with our peers." Clearly unhappy that the public may learn of the topics under discussion on the site, Dr Woodman sought to prevent such discoveries by concluding that [the web site], "should institute some form of copyright protection for contributors." His comments, made in the semi-privacy of a doctors-only forum, are in stark contrast to his more public statements made on behalf of his Trust. In the January / February 2003 edition of the PCTransformations Newsletter, Dr Woodman, in his capacity as a member of the Medway Transparency Group, discussed the Trust's progress towards compliance with the Code of Openness for NHS Organisations. Although some of the Trusts information was already in the public domain, it was not in a format that complied with the Group's ethos of accessibility and clarity. Said Dr Woodman, "These issues are probably best addressed in conjunction with the communications group and the information made accessible through the PCT website." The Trust, which was formed in April 2002, steers and supports local GPs and is the main planner, fund holder and commissioner of health services for the residents of Medway. In the 2002/2003 league tables, the Trust managed only a one star rating, significantly underachieving in one of the nine assessment categories and underachieving in a further two. According to the Commission for Health Improvement, this rating means that the "Trust is showing some cause for concern regarding particular key targets".
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