Grievances Disciplinaries Bullying Harassment Complaints March 2022+

Reference: 25-26006

Date response sent: 24/04/2025

Details of enquiry

Please can you detail the number of grievances, disciplinaries & bullying and harassment (dignity at work) complaints that have been raised in the last 3 years. It would be helpful if you could detail the information in the following table:

Response sent

The data you have requested for FY 2022/23 to FY 2024/25 is presented in the table/s below.

We have masked low numbers with the symbol ‘≤5’, which indicates where numbers are equal to 5 or less than 5. The Trust follows the NHS England standard, established to not provide exact data where the numbers are smaller than 6 as this may lead to identification of individuals.

The Trust has engaged exemption from releasing exact low numbers in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) Section 40(2) (Information which constitutes the personal data of any person other than the applicant, where disclosure would not be permitted under GDPR, thereby breaching GDPR Principle (a): Lawfulness, fairness and transparency.

As this is an absolute exemption, we do not have to apply the Public Interest Test when engaging this exemption

The Trust recognises a high level of interest from public in how the public purse has been spent on services, and must balance this against disclosure of any small numbers and the years in which these instances occurred, which – whilst not directly identifying individuals, would nevertheless give rise to a disclosure of personal data, as follows:

Although the year of alone is not personal data, we have also to consider whether other information that is already available, or may become available, to any member of the public, could be combined with the data requested so as to enable identification of the individual(s) concerned.
There is a high chance of recognition/identification of particular individuals/patients by fellow patients/colleagues and/or others from the low numbers.
This masking of low numbers is not a just a question of considering the means reasonably likely to be used by general public, but also the means likely to be used by a determined person with a particular reason to want to identify individuals from data in the public domain now or in the future, and/or gained from other sources.

Year	Number of Grievances	Number of Disciplinary Investigations	Number of B & H (DaW) *
1^st April 2022 – 31^st March 2023	7	≤5	≤5
1^st April 2023 – 31^st March 2024	7	≤5	7
1^st April 2024– 31^st March 2025	6	≤5	≤5

* bullying and harassment (dignity at work)