Exclusive GP leaders will discuss a motion condemning ‘openly racist and misogynistic comments’ made by TPP founder Frank Hester at a meeting today.
The BMA’s GP Committee will vote on whether to advise GP practices ‘to consider Hester’s comments prior to signing new contracts with TPP’.
According to a report by the Guardian earlier this week, Mr Hester said in a 2019 TPP company meeting that MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington Diane Abbott makes you ‘want to hate all black women’ and that she ‘should be shot’.
The company’s product SystmOne is one of the two leading patient consultation computer systems used by more than 2,700 GP practices across England.
The GPC motion’s draft wording, seen by Pulse, notes that the TPP leader’s comments ‘contravene NHS England’s fit and proper person test framework’; and calls upon all UK health boards to ‘apply their own processes vigilantly’ when contracting external stakeholders ‘whose views and values may not align with the wider professional national NHS workforce’.
It also calls for Mr Hester to ‘resign and hand over his directorship with immediate effect’.
The GPC’s TPP motion in full (draft wording)
That this meeting is disgusted by the violent, openly racist and misogynistic comments, made by Frank Hester, director of The Phoenix Partnership (TPP), and directed at the Rt Hon Ms Diane Abbott MP:
- notes that his comments contravene NHS England’s fit and proper person test framework introduced in response to the 2019 Kark Review recommendations, taking into account CQC requirements in relation to directors.
- calls upon UK health boards to apply their own processes vigilantly when contracting external stakeholders whose views and values may not align with the wider professional NHS workforce
- advises GP practices to consider Hester’s comments prior to signing new contracts with TPP
- believes Frank Hester should resign and handover his directorship with immediate effect
Pulse has contacted TPP for comment.
According to the Guardian, after the publication of the remarks, a statement from TPP said Mr Hester ‘accepts that he was rude about Diane Abbott in a private meeting several years ago but his criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin’.
Speaking in the House of Commons on Monday, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said Mr Hester had used ‘utterly revolting, racist and inciteful language’ which ‘has no place in our politics and public life’.
He called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to apologise to Ms Abbott and for the Conservative Party to hand back millions of donations made by Mr Hester.
Mr Hester, who founded TPP in 1997, has donated more than £10m to the Tory party in the past year.
Note: This piece was edited at 1:04pm on 14 March to reflect that the full motion contained draft wording
READERS' COMMENTS [9]
Please note, only GPs are permitted to add comments to articles
As Arsene Wenger famously said of Jose Mourinho, “sometimes when a stupid person has success, it makes them more stupid”
Liam that is now my quote of the week! The comments are vile and we need to have leaders that will give us hope not hate. We can only make a better world through hope and from shared understanding of one another.
Thank you GPC and thank you Pulse for reporting on this. Thanks also to all the good people that are doing good things in the shadows that we are unaware of.
Kind regards
Easy solution: everyone stop using their system.
Of course, it isn’t easy!
Racists breathe air and drink water; stop drinking and breathing immediately to avoid contamination.
It’s a horrible system, I never liked it when it was foisted on us in the OOH service, that was reason enough to stop using it, but to know now that it is owned by this bigot and that he has donated so much to the political party which is intent on destroying primary care is all the more reason to bin it.
The trouble with Frank Hester’s comments is that they make me want to hate all thick rich blokes, and that he should be de-nutted..
Having used EMIS software for 20 years being “forced” into switching to TPP’s System One was the driving force behind my early retirement. Needing to “learn” a whole load of stupid transatlantic words for things like patients current problem list and no logic to how things were laid out made looking through patients notes impossible – pages and pages of drivel from “health care professionals” filling up the patients text. How the practice managers ever persuaded their working GPs not involved in practice management to bend over and submit themselves to the management maze that was System One beggars belief. Marketing over process. Sooner System One disappears into the annals of time the better for day to day running of General Practice as far as I’m concerned. The fact that TPP is run by a right wing misogynistic racist hardly comes as any surprise.
I am incredulous how he expects professionals to believe that the quote “black women” contains no wrods indicative of either Colour of Gender. Is American English SO different to Queen’s English or even BBC English?