Miss A Senior v West Bank Residential Home Ltd T/A Buckland Care — 2021

The claimant, Miss A Senior, worked as a care worker at the Dunmore care home from 5 December 2019 until her dismissal on 11 August 2020. The tribunal found that she was a careful and well-liked worker, that there had been no disciplinary concerns about her work, and that she had raised concerns in July and August 2020 about medication being left unattended, nutritional needs being overlooked, shortages affecting continence care, poor personal care, and senior carers dispensing medication without proper qualifications. The tribunal also accepted that she had tried to raise those concerns internally before later speaking to the CQC.

The tribunal found that the respondent’s dismissal process was seriously deficient. No investigation was carried out, the claimant was not called to a meeting, the allegations were not put to her, and she was not given an opportunity to respond before dismissal. It found that Mrs Tina Bartin, not Miss Jenna Nortje, took the lead in the decision to dismiss, and that the respondent’s reasons were inconsistent, varying between short-notice sickness absence, alleged unreliability, alleged drunkenness, and the dismissal letter’s stated reason of a breakdown in the relationship.

The tribunal accepted that the claimant did make the disclosures to the CQC on 11 August 2020, and the respondent had conceded the relevant statutory elements if those disclosures were proved. However, the tribunal found that the decision to dismiss had already been taken on 10 August 2020, before the CQC disclosure was made. On that chronology, the protected disclosure could not have been the reason or principal reason for the dismissal within s.103A ERA 1996.

The tribunal noted that the evidence suggested the dismissal may have been linked to the claimant’s threat on 10 August 2020 to report the matter to the CQC, but it did not need to make a finding on that point. It also observed that a threat to whistleblow is not itself a protected disclosure, and that was not the claimant’s pleaded case. The claim was therefore found not well founded and dismissed.