What do you get when you mix indignation and disapproval with sympathy, sorrow and regret? I don’t know how to describe it: the mixture of feelings roused up more emotion: resulted in a deep feeling of lost, perhaps mixed with some shame.
I had this colleague in my hospital who has been on “gardening leave” for more than a year. He was under investigation for professional misconduct, which included various things from treating patients beyond his area of expertise to changing patient records and fraud. During all this time I had a deep sense of resentment because taxpayers were still paying him a full consultant salary, whilst he is on gardening leave (used to be a joke: consultant physician with subspecialty interest in gardening).
I thought: what a waste of resources, large amounts of money that could have been used for patient care, patient service improvement, new treatment development. Instead, we are paying someone to stay at home. Worse than that; whilst he was awaiting disciplinary hearing from GMC, he was allegedly still heavily engaged in private practice in his spare time. How unethical, I thought. He was being paid a full salary for not doing any NHS work; in the free time he earned lots of pounds privately. I was fuming. Come on: get on with the GMC hearing; either reinstate him if he is guiltless; otherwise suspend him and sack him!
Something just happened. I heard that whilst he was attending his GMC hearing, he collapsed suddenly. CT scan has confirmed massive haemorrhage from a large aneurysm. He died very quickly.
Suddenly everyone in my hospital, including myself, felt so sorry for him and his family. He left behind a wife and a few young kids. There is this collective guilt: did the hearing trigger a hypertensive episode that led to the bleed? Wonder how the family feel when they received a collective condolence letter from the hospital.
Well, guilt is illogical. He could have died even if events were different and he wasn’t in a discipliniary hearing. Or you could say he brought this on himself by his unprofessional behavior. Legally it was out of our hands anyway. We didn’t initiate the investigations; it all started due to whistle blowing from a distressed private secretary, who didn’t work for our hospital.
Nevertheless it was such a horrible event. The sorrow and guilt wil no doubt linger for a long time..
