Ep. 10 Brown paper envelopes
The Tip Off
The Tip Off
4.7 • 650 Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2017
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jennifer Williams, of the Manchester Evening News, was hearing horrible stories coming from two hospitals in her patch. Rumour had it, there was a damning report out there... but getting hold of it would be easier said than done.
Sources, FOI battles and an envelope full of surprises- this is the story of how one reporter revealed mothers and babies dying at a worrying rate.
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Music: Dice Muse, Komiku, John Spacek and Podington Bear
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One morning in autumn 2016, Jennifer Williams went to her front door and found a brown paper envelope on the mat. |
| 0:11.0 | The contents of that envelope would result in a series of stories, detailing horrifying truths about mothers and babies dying unnecessarily but she didn't know that then to get |
| 0:24.9 | to that point we have to start earlier at the beginning I'm Mace McClenigan and |
| 0:31.8 | this is the tip-off my name My name is Jennifer Williams. |
| 0:42.8 | I'm the social affairs editor at the Manchester Evening News. |
| 0:47.0 | Jennifer Williams has a big patch to cover. |
| 0:50.1 | Working at the Manchester Evening News, |
| 0:52.2 | her job involves not only covering a whole range of issues, |
| 0:55.0 | but also a really wide geographical area. |
| 0:59.0 | Take for example her work on health. |
| 1:01.0 | So I cover Greater Manchester and that has, off the top of my head, I think, 11 different hospitals. |
| 1:08.0 | And I think four or five of them fall under Penine Acute. |
| 1:10.8 | So it's a really big. |
| 1:12.6 | NHS hospitals all belong to parent trusts and one in Jennifer's patch was Penine Acute. |
| 1:19.4 | Now that was a trust that had been set up around 10 years earlier. |
| 1:23.0 | It's a really really big trust and I think it's the second, certainly was at the time, the second biggest hospital trust in the country. |
| 1:31.6 | And there had been, really there had been issues from day one. |
| 1:35.1 | So this trust was already on Jennifer's radar. |
| 1:38.2 | She'd periodically hear people with complaints, grumbles about the service there. |
| 1:42.4 | There was one local politician, Graeme Stringer, |
| 1:45.8 | who was MP for Blackley and Broughton, who was particularly vocal about concerns there. |
| 1:51.0 | He'd sort of been complaining for a long time and not being very well served by this trust. |
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