By John-Paul Ford Rojas, and Richard Alleyne

Gary Walker, who was head of a hospital trust that is now being investigated over high death rates, said he was paid £500,000 to keep quiet when he was dismissed in 2010. 

But when he decided to reveal his concerns earlier this week he was threatened with legal action and told by the NHS he faced paying back the money and any extra legal costs.

The father-of-two went ahead anyway. 

“I stand to lose everything if they sue,” he told the Daily Mail. 

I only signed the order because my legal fees had reached £100,000 and I was about to lose my house. 

“But it has got to the stage where thousands and thousands of patients are dying needlessly in NHS hospitals and the government says no one’s to blame, someone needs to stand up and be counted.”
Mr Walker alleges that he prioritised scarce resources on emergency care despite pressure from above to meet targets on non-emergency treatment “whatever the demand”, while he was chief executive at the United Lincolnshire Hospitals trust (ULHT).
He claimed that on one occasion he was even ordered by a strategic health authority boss, now a senior NHS official, to take hospitals off “red alert” status – meaning that they were too full to take any more patients – because of a delicate budget meeting taking place at the time.
The allegations prompted Stephen Dorrell, chairman of the Commons health select committee, to call for a new criminal offence to combat the “corrupt” practice of NHS employees being gagged from speaking out over patient safety.
Mr Walker was sacked from the Trust in February 2010. Officially, the reason for his dismissal was that he swore openly at meetings but his supporters claimed there was more to the charge. 

Managers in the trust had been told their “careers rested on delivering the targets” and were neglecting patient care, he told the Daily Mail.

He claimed Sir David was “not interested in patient safety” and should resign.
The NHS chief is already under pressure for presiding over the Mid Staffordshire scandal where failures in patient care that led to the deaths of up to 1,200 patients were laid bare in a damning report last week.

He has resisted calls to quit.

Mr Walker said he had warned senior civil servants that he was confronted with the same choices over prioritising care that resulted in the scandal.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s a simple decision: you have emergency care or you have care that could wait. 

“It’s not nice to wait but it could wait and therefore we chose as a board – it was not just me – that … emergency care should take priority.”
He said he was ordered by the East Midlands Strategic Health Authority to meet the 18-week non-emergency target “whatever the demand” and was told to resign when he would not do so.
Mr Walker told the Today programme he accepted a so-called “supergag” as part of a settlement package of an unfair dismissal claim – reported to be at least £500,000 – to protect his family. 

He said: “This is a culture of fear, a culture of oppression – of information that’s either going to embarrass a civil servant or embarrass a minister.
“These are big problems. And if you consider that the people that have been running the NHS have created that culture of fear, they need either to be held to account or new people need to be brought in to change that culture.”
Mr Walker said on one occasion he had put hospitals on “red alert” – a system used within the NHS to tell other hospitals, ambulances, and GPs that the hospital is full.
“I got a phone call from the health authority – this is Barbara Hakin – saying to me that I needed to come off red alert.

I said ‘the hospital is not safe to come off red alert’ because it’s full’. 

“The response was ‘well, we have a capital budget that we’re going to approve today and if you’re still on red alert it’s going to be difficult for me to support your case to the board.

“My view was ‘what’s the approval of capital money got to do with running a safe hospital?’ So these are the sort of the threats that are made to you in order for you to keep trying to deliver targets and that’s just not the right way.”
A statement on behalf of the East Midlands Strategic Health Authority and Dame Barbara Hakin said: “The East Midlands SHA totally refutes all the allegations made by Gary Walker and his account of the specific conversations with Dame Barbara Hakin, the then SHA chief executive. 

Sent by T.Stokes London