That took eleven months and it is not finished.
The fourteen months, which people imagine as a holiday and which I am going to describe once.
I was not suspended. That is a word people use and it is wrong, and the distinction mattered enormously to me at the time and matters not at all now.
I was “restricted from clinical duties pending investigation”, which means you come in. You badge
in at the same door at half seven. You walk past your own clinic and you go to an office on the fourth floor and you do audit work that a band five could do, and at one o’clock you go to the same canteen as everybody who knows.
Fourteen months of that.
Three people stopped speaking to me. I am not going to name them. Two of them were at my wedding.
Eleven people were extraordinary — the sister, Bernadine, who rang me every Sunday for a year; a registrar called Olu who sent me a photograph of every single thank-you card that came into the department with my name on it, for fourteen months, without comment.
And the rest of that building did the thing people do, which is nothing at all, pleasantly, in corridors.
I lost about a stone. I did not drink, which surprised everybody including me,
and started running instead, which is more embarrassing.
And in the April of 2024 I wrote a letter of resignation and did not send it, and it is still in a drawer, and Halla has asked me twice why I keep it and I have not got an answer that satisfies either of us.
Yvie.
She was twenty-nine when she signed that statement.
I have read it about forty times. It is a page and a half and it is not, in itself, a lie — that is the clever bit, and it is the bit that tells you who drafted it.
It says that I worked long hours. True. It says I was distressed in the staff room on an occasion in the November of 2022 — which I was, because I had come out of a clinic in which I had told a family something nobody wants to hear, and
she sat with me for forty minutes and got me tea.
And it says that she had “concerns about Dr Sandell’s wellbeing in the period in question”.
She did. She had told me so, in my own kitchen, repeatedly, because she was my friend.
Every true thing she had ever noticed about me as a friend went into a document as a concern from a colleague.
She tried to take it back.
On the ninth of April, 2024 — two months after I signed the settlement, three months before her son was born — Yvie Grear wrote to the regulator asking to withdraw her statement.
Two paragraphs. It says she signed it believing it was a welfare referral, that she had not understood it would form part of a complaint about my fitness to practise, and that she did not wish it to be relied upon.
It is in the file. It
is stamped. It was received.
Nobody told me. That is not sinister; it is how those processes work. It went on the file and the investigation continued and closed five months later, and the letter sat there, and I did not know it existed until the twenty-third of July, 2025, in a hospital corridor with a broken bottle on the floor.
What I did with that.
She was referred to her own regulator in the November of 2025, as the inevitable consequence of signing a statement in a malicious complaint.
And I gave evidence on her behalf.
Not a character reference. A factual statement about the April letter: that she had written it, that it was unprompted, that it predated any legal action of mine by fourteen months, and that she could not have known in the April of 2024 that any of it would ever come out.
Hollis Quayle
