What changed
Dr Sarah Redvers says she was bullied and forced out of her NHS safeguarding role after raising concerns about gender-related care. She has brought a constructive-dismissal claim against NHS Sussex Integrated Care Board and its former chief executive, Adam Doyle.
The concerns began in July 2020. In June 2026, a separate NHS safety investigation found that 78 children at the WellBN practice may have been harmed after puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones were prescribed without proper checks. NHS Surrey and Sussex apologised to Redvers and said some employment processes should have been handled differently.
Why it matters
This is two failures unfolding alongside each other: a dispute over how a safeguarding concern was handled, and a later finding that children may have received treatment without the required checks.
Redvers was a named safeguarding GP, a role intended to give doctors somewhere to take worries about patient safety. She says complaints from several GPs were redirected into an investigation of her, while the medical concerns themselves were sidelined. She also says investigators warned of a “general worry” about allegations of transphobia.
That creates a serious lesson for any health system: safeguarding processes have to examine the substance of a concern, not let a charged subject turn the person raising it into the main problem. The tribunal has not yet decided whether Redvers was constructively dismissed, and the later safety investigation did not establish that her earlier complaints caused its findings. But the timing makes the institutional question difficult to avoid: what happens when professionals fear that raising a patient-safety concern will put their own careers under scrutiny?
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