Surgeon under pressure to resign Colleagues alienated after telephone tape handed over

his post.

Mr Duncan Walker, credited with saving the lives of thousands of

children at Killingbeck Hospital in Leeds, has been told that patient

care is at risk because of the atmosphere he has created.

The alienation of Mr Walker's fellow doctors and surgeons followed an

investigation earlier this year into allegations that another heart

surgeon, Mr Unni Nair, had been bribed to move NHS patients up the

waiting list.

This was based on telephone conversations which Mr Walker had taped

and passed to the local health authority. Mr Nair was immediately

suspended and the police were called in, but after a three-month

investigation he was exonerated.

Mr Walker, 52, whose fund-raising for the hospital earned him the

title Yorkshireman of the Year in 1990, has been on sick leave since

February with septicaemia caused by a rose thorn which pricked his

finger.

''It was quite serious -- I nearly lost my hand -- but I have

scheduled my next clinic for the first week in June,'' he said.

Mr Walker alleges that a GP in Bradford offered Mr Nair #2500 over the

phone to admit a patient, in effect moving him up the waiting list.

''What he was asking was highly illegal. I taped the conversation and

my secretary took a shorthand note of a conversation he had with her. I

immediately took the advice of my legal advisers, the Medical and Dental

Defence Union of Scotland, and they advised me to hand the tape over to

the regional health authority's legal department, which I did.

Remarks in the tape about Mr Nair brought him into the frame, but he

was cleared after the investigation.

Mr Walker said: ''This matter isn't really about Unni Nair or Duncan

Walker -- Mr Nair is a good friend of mine and attended my birthday

party last year. It's about the fact that the health authority think

that, by shooting the messenger, they can sweep the message under the

carpet.''

Mr Walker attended a meeting last month of the Killingbeck Consultant

Staff Committee; his colleagues claimed his return would create

considerable tension in the hospital, which would make the running of

the operating theatre department particularly difficult.

As evidence of their loss of confidence, they cited the decline of

referrals of new patients to Mr Walker, once one of the busiest heart

surgeons in the country doing 20 operations a week. Now his waiting list

is 29 compared to Mr Nair's 174 and two other colleagues' 291 and 114.

The committee have asked the chief executive of the United Leeds

Teaching Hospital Trust to meet Mr Walker to consider his position, but

a spokesman for the trust said there would be no action until Mr Walker

returned from sick-leave. In the meantime, it had no comment.

Born in Uddingston, near Glasgow, Mr Walker has had a remarkable

career. He left school at 15 and served his apprenticeship as an

engineer in the shipyards. But on his uncle's advice he left heavy

engineering and went to study medicine at Glasgow University, where he

was on the students' union board with, among others, the late John

Smith.

He worked at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Great Ormond Street in London,

and in Alabama before joining Killingbeck as a children's heart surgeon.

His pioneering surgery included reconstruction of a six-month-old

boy's heart using a pig heart and human donor tissue, and other

transplant firsts on young patients and on adults. He was credited with

phenomenal work sometimes running at 20 operations a week.

Mr Walker also became a celebrity because of his fund-raising work. He

mounted a campaign in the 1980s to raise #1m for the hospital's

paediatric intensive care unit.

''I have been here 20 years and worked my backside off,'' he said. ''I

have acted according to the instructions of the defence union -- I made

no accusations, I simply handed the tape over. It was the health

authority, not I, who called in the police. I am really disgusted at

what is happening now.''