Payout woes

Angus Logan (Platform, 7 January) refers to our “compensation culture” highlighted by the recent stress at work cases among teachers, where the maximum award reported was £250,000 for psychiatric illness, while Gerry Hassan in the same edition states that Mrs Thatcher’s “Englishness and the fact she was a woman” rubbed Scots up the wrong way – surely race and sexual discrimination?

Maybe the cases are not closely analogous, but the negligible comment on an NHS consultant’s recent £4.45 million award for sexual and race discrimination is surprising. Media reports gave no details of Dr Eva Michalak’s medical background in Poland or previous UK experience, but she joined Pontefract General Infirmary on £90,000 in early 2002, became pregnant intentionally and gave birth in May 2003 aged 45, taking full maternity leave. On returning, she requested unsuccessfully the increase her colleagues received for covering her duties. They intensified the campaign against her begun during her pregnancy, leading to her suspension in January 2006 and dismissal in July 2008; so though employed for just over six years she actually worked for just over three.

The experience was so traumatic that she cannot do everyday tasks, is reluctant to leave home, will never again work as a doctor and may never fully recover.

While we all react differently to similar levels of harassment, abuse and false allegations, such severe consequences seem extreme in one deemed sufficiently resilient, mentally strong and self-confident to be employed as an NHS consultant. Her husband avers that without this trauma they would have had more children – in her late 40s?

The award comprised future earnings loss (£992,000), pension loss (£666,000), past earnings lost (£168,000), miscellaneous sums (£257,000), 15 per cent discretionary increase (£311,000), totalling £2.4 million plus tax there-on of £2.06m – giving the grossed-up total compensation of £4.452m. This represents 49 years’ salary, longer than most working lives. Invested in 4.5 per cent bonds it would give her £200,000 pa, or it would buy a £100,000 index-linked annuity for the rest of both her and her husband’s joint lives.

No-one would defend the NHS staff who perpetrated or permitted the disgraceful campaign, or deny its effects on her, but these figures surely highlight the absurdity of many such compensation calculations much more than the teaching examples.

The UK cannot afford an NHS with a bottomless pit at one extreme and a “sky’s the limit” culture at the other.

John Birkett

Horseleys Park

St Andrews, Fife