My name is Dr Lynne Amidon and I am a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and Team Manager working for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. I qualified as a Child Psychotherapist in 1999 and have spent the past 24 years of my life working with abused and neglected children trying to ensure they are given the best care, protection and safeguarding whilst under the auspices of the State system.

I believe that all children have the right to a decent level of care, including when the State becomes involved in their care and deciding who can care for them.

I work as part of the Complex Assessment Team (CAT) and am responsible to the Service Manager of the Camden CAMHS.

My role and the role of my team is to provide expert witness assessments and evidence to the Family Court when social services are involved in child care proceedings.

I am raising funds to bring legal claims against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in the employment tribunal. Some of these legal claims may involve whistleblowing claims and discrimination. My claim centers around my belief that I have been subjected to detriments because I brought concerns to my employers about child safeguarding.

What is Safeguarding?

NHS trusts and similar health organisations must work with other internal departments and external agencies to ensure there are 'root and branch' systems to keep patients and service users safe. This means responding to patient/service users' personal experiences, also including their environmental, familial, community/peer circumstances and sometimes any of these domains could require the intervention of other professionals in different agencies. Safeguarding children and young people also concerns ensuring there is a sufficiently healthy culture in organisations that does not contribute to harming the people who use and deliver NHS services.

I hope to raise an initial £2,500 so that I can pay my legal team to lodge a claim in the employment tribunal and to consider any defence the Tavistock may file.

I will then hope to raise further funds in order to bring the case to trial. I have set the Crowdfunder to £50,000 and hopefully that will cover my legal fees. The normal rules of Crowd Funders apply. I cannot guarantee that I will win my case however I will give it my best shot.

I am trying to ensure that in future staff at the Tavistock are free to bring whistleblowing claims to the Tavistock without being subject to detriments.

Within a short period of time, we will be issuing my claim against the Tavistock. There are very short time limits in the employment tribunal.

I am instructing Elliot Hammer of Branch Austin McCormick LLP who represented Sonia Appleby in her successful whistleblowing claim against the Tavistock in 2021. A link to the publicity in that case is https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58453250

Ms Lynne Amidon, PhD -- Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, BA, MA, MA, MPhil, PHD, MACP 

Ms Amidon is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and she gained her qualification as a child psychotherapist in 1999. She has extensive experience of working psychotherapeutically with looked after children, adolescents and parents and she has worked as an expert witness for the family courts since 2001. Ms Amidon has also worked over the past 20 years as a clinical organisational consultant to a number of residential therapeutic units, both for adolescents and for primary aged children. She has worked as a clinician in a variety of settings, both in CAMHS and inpatient services (including the Tavistock Mulberry Bush Day Unit, the Adolescent Department at the Tavistock Clinic and the Beacon Centre at Edgware Hospital, an adolescent inpatient unit).

She has undertaken family assessments for the Courts as a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Monroe Young Family Service between 2001 and 2010; as the Clinical Director of the Monroe Young Family Centre from 2003-2005; as a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Monroe Family Assessment Service from 2010-2011; working privately as an expert witness from 2011 to the present; as a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist in MALT at Camden Local Authority from 2015-2016; and as the Team Manager of Complex Assessment Team which provides assessment and work with families in pre-proceedings, in proceedings and post proceedings from 2016, for Camden Local Authority.

She has supervised a wide range of students and taught on many courses at the Tavistock Clinic since the late 1990’s, including the MA and Doctorate level courses for child psychotherapy trainees, social workers, psychologists, SPR’s and teachers. She works in private practice with children, adolescents and their parents.

Qualifications: Ms Amidon has an M Psych in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Children, Young People and Parents and an PG Diploma in Observational Studies and the Application of Psychoanalytical Concepts to Work with Children, Young People and Families, both gained at the Tavistock Clinic. She completed a PhD in Modern European History before training as a Child Psychotherapist. Ms Amidon is a Member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP).