Chloe Moffat was 26, in line for a promotion, and had just been given a bonus for good work when an anonymous complaint set a disciplinary process in motion that she was never equipped to survive. She was denied support at the meeting that followed. She was not told, crucially, that her job was safe. She took her own life the day after. The Treasury, where she worked, is now rewriting its disciplinary procedures in response to her death, a correction that arrives too late to help her but not too late to matter for others.

Her case sits at the centre of a report published this week by the UK Faculty of Public Health, which argues that badly handled workplace investigations should be treated as a public health issue on a par with smoking or poor diet. The faculty's language is unusually blunt for a professional body. Disciplinary processes, it says, are frequently applied in ways that prioritise procedure over people, causing what it calls population-level harm through lost trust, avoidable sickness absence and damaged morale. Acas figures put the annual cost of the UK's 1.7 million disciplinary cases at £28.5 billion, most of it driven by the dismissals and resignations that poorly conducted processes tend to produce.

None of this reads, at first glance, as an NHS story. But no employer in Britain has more reason to examine its own disciplinary culture than the health service, and the reasons go well beyond scale. NHS workforce race equality data has for years shown that staff from minority ethnic backgrounds are referred to disciplinary processes, and to professional regulators, at markedly higher rates than their white colleagues, often for comparable conduct. The pattern has been documented, discussed at board level, and only partially addressed. A national report warning that mechanistic disciplinary practice causes measurable harm gives that long-running concern a sharper, more urgent framing.

There is a second, more particular reason the NHS should pay attention. Clinical incident investigation operates on a logic strikingly similar to the one the faculty criticises in workplace discipline generally. Maternity safety reviews, from Ockenden through to the more recent examinations at Nottingham and Leeds, have repeatedly found that the staff involved in adverse events were subjected to processes built around procedural completeness rather than psychological safety, producing what safety researchers call second victims: clinicians who carry the weight of an investigation long after any formal finding is closed. The faculty's report makes the same observation about disciplinary managers, describing the emotional strain and workload of conducting an investigation as harm in its own right. The overlap is not coincidental. Both systems assume that following the correct steps is equivalent to doing right by the people involved, and both have been shown, repeatedly, not to be.

This matters now because NHS leadership has less capacity to absorb another source of institutional distrust than at almost any point in recent memory. Sir Jim Mackey's drive to centralise accountability, the consolidation of integrated care boards from 42 to 26, and the unresolved cycle of industrial action among consultants and resident doctors have already tested staff confidence in how the service treats those who work within it. A disciplinary culture that staff experience as punitive rather than proportionate will not sit quietly alongside that strain. It will compound it.

The faculty's report offers a working alternative, developed at Aneurin Bevan University health board in Wales, built around the principle of avoidable employee harm. The results are concrete rather than aspirational: a 71 per cent reduction in the number of formal investigations, more than 3,000 sick days prevented, and estimated savings of £700,000 a year. That model deserves serious scrutiny in England, not as a piece of HR best practice to be filed away, but as a genuine test of whether NHS leadership is willing to apply the same reasoning to staff investigations that it claims, not always convincingly, to apply to patient safety. The service has spent a decade learning, slowly and at real cost, that mechanistic process without judgment fails patients. It has not yet fully absorbed that the same failure applies to the people delivering their care.