24 Whistle blower activity
This is a group activity that takes a Marxist approach to the question of bad behaviour in healthcare.
Given the nature of the material, this should only be used in a group setting where people are comfortable sharing potentially traumatic stories. Care should be taken to provide support for anyone affected by the stories that emerge.
It should also be stated that this is by no means an exercise in exonerating people who have done terrible things in the name of healthcare. Rather, it looks at the ‘upstream’, social conditions that make malpractice more likely.
Method
- Ask everyone in the group to think of the worst thing you’ve ever heard of, seen or witnessed as a health professional
- Get them to write a salacious tabloid newspaper headline to describe it
- Get everyone to write their various headlines on the whiteboard
- Ask the group to vote on their favourite headline
- Ask the person with the most votes to recount the story – anonymised, of course
- Ask the group to put aside personal judgements of the individuals and focus instead on how social conditions like wage slavery might have played a part in perpetuating, covering up or, in the end, exposing the malpractice
