Trainee patient advocate reinstated after ‘error’ saw her job terminated

Whistleblower Louise Bayliss has been reinstated in her job after her employer said “an error” had been made in letting two trainees go.

Ms Bayliss claims she lost her job for speaking out about the plight of mental health patients who were due to be moved to a locked unit at St Brendan’s Hospital, Grangegorman, Dublin, over Christmas.

Colette Nolan, the chief executive of the Irish Advocacy Network, said the organisation now realised it had made an error in deciding to terminate the posts of two trainee peer advocates.

One of the trainees has already agreed to accept the reinstatement offer and it is understood that the network is meeting with Ms Bayliss today.

Ms Nolan stressed that the HSE had no role whatsoever in the decision to let the two trainees go or in their decision to reinstate them.

“After more in-depth and intensive consultation with colleagues in the organisation… we realise that we made an error in this regard so we offered yesterday to reinstate the two people concerned with immediate effect.”

Ms Bayliss, from Dublin, said she was delighted to be getting her job back but hoped there would be no conditions attached that would prevent her from speaking out in the future.

Ms Nolan said the breaches of their code of practice that emerged in St Brendan’s crystallised concerns they had about a new training model.

“Rather than re-assign the two trainees in Dublin to other duties while these changes to the training programme were being put in place, we mistakenly decided to terminate their training posts as we couldn’t continue with their training at this present time,” she said.

Ms Nolan said that the two trainees would be reassigned to other duties until the new training programme got under way at the end of February. They would also be offered training posts from March.

Meanwhile, Brendan Howlin, the reform minister, told the Dáil yesterday that legislation to protect whistleblowers, the Protective Disclosure Bill, would be published in the first half of this year.

John Devitt, the chief executive of Transparency International Ireland, said many people calling its helpline said they were afraid they might lose their jobs if they spoke out about a wrongdoing.