A retired NHS Tayside manager says she and her team were ordered back to their desks at the height of the coronavirus pandemic under threat of disciplinary action.
The whistleblower is one of a group of workers who refused to work from their usual office as the nation was told to stay at home.
Up until March 2021, NHS Tayside policy was for all workers to report to their usual base as normal despite their duties.
A probe by the Independent National Whistleblowing Officer has also ruled the policy was unreasonable, with a former employee who spoke to The Courier describing how it left her facing a disciplinary as she defied the policy.
Leading a team in a non-clinical area, the now-retired manager says she was told to prepare for a move to home working in the week before lockdown was formally announced by Nicola Sturgeon.
‘We could do what we needed from home’
Assured her team could access the right systems, she told NHS Tayside bosses they could effectively do their roles away from the office.
She explained: “We could do what we needed from home, we were logging on to the secure system, so there wasn’t any data problems.
“The reality was we also had better equipment at home. Our office computers had no cameras and no microphones. So we couldn’t go on calls when we would expect to collaborate with other teams.”
But in the same week lockdown was announced, she claims to have received a call asking why the team had not been at their usual office.
She told The Courier: “When lockdown came, on the Monday night I got a call asking why we weren’t in the office.
“From then on things were just really difficult, we were constantly asked to go in. I explained we didn’t have the equipment and nothing was done.
“We were also working in an area where I was concerned we couldn’t social distance. We had one toilet with two cubicles used by 15 or 16 people and a little half sink. I had great concerns and none of them were addressed, I just kept getting phone calls telling us to come in.
“We were working efficiently, and yet we were still told to get into the office.
“This was during the first year. We didn’t have vaccinations and we didn’t really understand Covid.”
The manager decided to ignore the requests to return in favour of protecting her own health and that of her team.
‘I was concerned about my team but it did not matter’
She says: “I had mentioned all these things to them about the office, and that I was concerned about people in my team, but it did not matter. It did not matter what the government said, we were just told to come in.
“I was actually threatened with a disciplinary or worse – being sacked.
“I was threatened, but I wasn’t too worried about that. I had worked for a long time in the NHS and felt that i’d never had a problem, so I wasn’t worried.
“It was about a year later I made a formal complaint eventually and went to HR, and things improved a bit. There was a period we were left to it and then there was a decision we could work at home.”
The allegations come after current NHS Tayside chief executive Grant Archibald announced he would stand down.
Appointed in 2019, his handling of several crises affecting the health board have dominated his time in the role.
An NHS Tayside spokesperson said that support from non-clinical teams was essential while frontline staff responded to the pandemic.
She added: “The Independent National Whistleblowing Officer’s report published in December 2022 upheld a complaint that the Board had failed to comply with the Scottish Government guidance on working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
”The report, however, added that the hybrid arrangements for working from home in NHS Tayside implemented in early 2021 following the most intensive spikes of Covid-19 infection were reasonable.
“The report also acknowledged the significant pressures facing the NHS at this time, and stated that the decision was concerned only with the complaint made to the whistleblowing officer and its specific context.
“NHS Tayside has ensured there is organisational learning from the report.”
Conversation