Review into the Trust’s handling of former doctor sentenced for child sexual abuse material

In March a former Royal Devon Healthcare Trust employee, Alexander Knight (Grice), was convicted of five charges of downloading and viewing indecent images of children.

This is a particularly distressing criminal case and the Trust commissioned an independent review to help us understand what we could learn from it. We accept all the recommendations of the review. We are publishing it in full and to the public, because transparency and a shared understanding is important. As well as being published to our website, the report will be discussed at Board in public on Wednesday 31 July. You can read it here.

The review concludes that no one in the Trust is to blame for what happened and that the responsibility for his actions lies with Alexander Knight. It finds that the systems we have in place contained the situation, ensured close cooperation with other agencies and the police and ultimately led to his conviction.  

The review also concludes that there are two areas where the Trust could make improvements. One is our culture in relation to sexual and psychological safety and we have already begun a programme of work to address this. The other recommendation is that we review the systems and processes we have in place for the management of doctors, in particular that we:

• Review the human resources expertise available to medical managers and consider having a medical staffing department that also has the capability to carry out the support and resolution function
• Review systems used to store and manage information about doctors so that it is unaffected by changes in personnel, there is clarity about what it stored where as well as what information should be escalated when.
• Review how decisions are made and how doctors are supervised when they experience difficulties

The police were able to confirm through geolocation that none of the images from the criminal case were taken at the Trust. Nevertheless we understand that this news may be very distressing to read, if you would like to talk and share any concerns you can contact our helpline on 01271 314090.