UPDATED The hospital board running St George’s and Queen Mary’s has admitted it might not notice if a doctor was harming patients.
At a public meeting last month, at Queen Mary’s in Roehampton, the St George’s, Epsom and St Helier group rated itself only “partial assurance”, boardroom language for not being confident, that it would catch a clinician giving patients dangerously poor care. It gave itself the same rating on whether staff feel able to speak up when something is wrong.
Nobody put the question to the board’s medical director, Dr Richard Jennings. He raised it himself. “It would be right for me and for the board to be asked,” he told the meeting, “how do we know that there aren’t any other doctors in this organisation who are giving such poor care that they’re harming patients, and we’re not recognising it.”
Putney.news asked St George’s a version of that exact same question in September 2025. It refused to answer.
We asked how the trust knew no other clinician was harming patients, after a senior nurse’s dangerous errors there went unnoticed for years. St George’s refused the request, citing data protection law. At internal review it admitted it had applied that law wrongly, and then still did not answer the question. The dispute is now with the Information Commissioner’s Office, case number IC-402999-T9T9, unresolved as of this week.
The nurse, Mark Barry, was suspended over more than sixty clinical failings at St George’s. The trust referred him to the Nursing and Midwifery Council in January 2022; the outcome did not arrive until March 2025, more than three years later.
Barry worked at St George’s. The doctor whose care prompted last month’s admission worked at St Helier, a different hospital and a legally separate trust within the same group. What links the two cases is the assurance rating: the board gave it for the whole group, St George’s and Queen Mary’s included.
Why the question came up at all
The trust asked the Royal College of Physicians, an outside body of senior doctors, to check the care given by one consultant at St Helier to patients with a lung condition called interstitial lung disease, between 2019 and 2023. The college looked at 28 cases. Twelve involved serious harm, and three patients may have died sooner than they should have.
The consultant, named only as “Dr X” in the report, stopped working at the trust in 2023.
The trust has accepted all 19 of the college’s recommendations and says it has written to every patient it reviewed, and to next of kin where the patient has since died. Anyone who was treated for interstitial lung disease at St Helier between 2019 and 2023, and has not heard from the trust, can call its advice line on 020 8296 2401 or 01372 735293.
Eight weeks before that report reached the board, in June 2025, St George’s would not even confirm or deny that it held internal records on Mark Barry. In July 2026, the same group published, unprompted, a full external review of a different clinician’s care, including the harm found and its own response, blacking out only the doctor’s name.
The trust has been asked why it could publish one case and not the other, and whether it will now release what it withheld from this paper.
Jennings apologised more than once for how slowly the trust had acted on early warning signs. The group’s chief executive, Matthew Shaw, told the board: “We shouldn’t have anyone who’s autonomously making decisions without any kind of oversight or peer review.” Nobody forced either admission out of them.
The speak-up rating followed a CQC inspection that found St George’s needed to improve how staff raise concerns. Asked what had changed since, the regulator said its October report had covered the issue extensively, including the scale of work needed to improve the trust’s culture, and that it had nothing further to add. The equivalent inspection at Epsom and St Helier has still not been published; the CQC says it is going through quality assurance. Jennings told the board that one member of staff who raised concerns about the St Helier consultant’s care left the organisation afterwards, and did not feel able to stay.
What happens next
The trust thinks it will find more harm it has not yet identified. It is now checking the care of every patient treated for interstitial lung disease at St Helier between 2019 and 2023, more than 200 people, a process it expects to take six months to a year. The results go to a future public board meeting.
We put questions to the Care Quality Commission and to the trust, including whether the trust will now release what it withheld from this paper’s 2025 request. The CQC answered within a day. The trust had not responded by the time this story was published.
What the Board doesn’t yet appear to have fully realised is that it has a cultural problem: if answers only appear when the Board spots them and pushes for answers, it will only encourage the Trust itself to get better at hiding its problems.
The purest test of whether a Trust has a healthy culture of disclosure and honesty is whether it answers queries from outside voices, rather than spend a year inventing new reasons why it can’t.
Updated 10 August 2026, 5pm. This story was published before the Care Quality Commission responded to our questions. It has been updated to include the regulator’s answer on speak-up arrangements at St George’s, and its statement that the well-led inspection of Epsom and St Helier is going through quality assurance and has not yet been published. An earlier version referred to that inspection as covering St Helier; it covers the Epsom and St Helier trust. The trust’s own response, if one arrives, will be added.
If you were treated for interstitial lung disease at Epsom or St Helier between 2019 and 2023, and think you should have been contacted and have not been, the trust’s advice line is 020 8296 2401 or 01372 735293.
If you work at St George’s, Epsom or St Helier and want to raise a concern, the group’s Freedom to Speak Up team can be reached at gesh.ftsu@stgeorges.nhs.uk.
The next public board meetings are at St George’s on 3 September 2026, St Helier on 6 November 2026, and Queen Mary’s, Roehampton on 7 January 2027.
Wandsworth’s Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee can be contacted at laura.campbell@richmondandwandsworth.gov.uk.
