NHS whistleblower paid £500,000 to keep quiet over patient safety breaks silence to expose 'culture of fear' The trust is now being investigated over fears that as many as 500 patients may have died needlessly because of poor care. Mr Walker told a newspaper that he warned Sir David in a three-page letter in 2009 that things were going badly wrong. Managers in the trust had been told their "careers rested on delivering the targets" and were neglecting patient care, he told the Daily Mail. He claimed Sir David was "not interested in patient safety" and should resign. The NHS chief is already under pressure for presiding over the Mid Staffordshire scandal where failures in patient care that led to the deaths of up to 1,200 patients were laid bare in a damning report last week. He has resisted calls to quit. Mr Walker said he had warned senior civil servants that he was confronted with the same choices over prioritising care that resulted in the scandal. He told BBC Radio 4"s Today programme: "It's a simple decision: you have emergency care or you have care that could wait. It's not nice to wait but it could wait and therefore we chose as a board - it was not just me - that ... emergency care should take priority. He said he was ordered by the East Midlands Strategic Health Authority to meet the 18-week non-emergency target "whatever the demand" and was told to resign when he would not do so. Mr Walker told Today he accepted a so-called "supergag" as part of a settlement package of an unfair dismissal claim - reported to be at least £500,000 - to protect his family. He said: "This is a culture of fear, a culture of oppression - of information that's either going to embarrass a civil servant or embarrass a minister. These are big problems. And if you consider that the people that have been running the NHS have created that culture of fear, they need either to be held to account or new people need to be brought in to change that culture. The East Midlands Strategic Health Authority told the BBC it "utterly refuted" Mr Walker's claims and acted at all times "in the interest of patients." An NHS spokesman said it had recently set out a "legal right" for staff to raise concerns about safety and it had been made it clear to NHS hospitals that "gagging" clauses should not be used.