In a significant development, the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry is set to hold its final sessions just days after NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) admitted that infections among some child cancer patients were likely linked to the hospital’s water system. This marks a stark contrast to the health board’s previous denials regarding the role of the water system in these infections.
The inquiry, which has been examining the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of hospitals, will hear four days of final oral submissions before publishing a report later this year. The first day will feature counsel for the inquiry, followed by testimony from the Greater Glasgow health board on Tuesday afternoon.
The change in position by NHSGGC emerged in a document submitted ahead of the final inquiry session. The health board acknowledged that, “on the balance of probabilities,” there was a causal connection between a high rate of bloodstream infections among child patients and the hospital environment, particularly the water system. It was noted that infection rates fell after remedial work was carried out in 2018, including changes to the water system.
This admission has been welcomed by the families of children who died following infections, but they lament that it should have come much sooner. Kimberly Darroch, the mother of 10-year-old Milly Main, who suffered septic shock after an intravenous line became infected in 2017, stated, “As a mother, I’ve spent six years fighting for answers that should have been given at the very beginning.”
Milly, who was being treated for leukaemia, was in remission at the time of her death. John Cuddihy, whose daughter Molly died aged 23 last August, seven years after she was infected, described the admission as “overdue recognition” of problems with the water system that families had been warning about for years.
The inquiry’s remit also includes issues at Edinburgh’s Royal Hospital for Children and Young People (RHCYP), where the opening had been delayed due to safety concerns about the ventilation system. An interim report on the RHCYP has already been issued, stating that a spreadsheet error by the health board led to the system being wrongly specified.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has called for senior hospital officials and politicians who were in post at the time, including Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney, to be investigated. The NHSGGC has already been named by prosecutors in a corporate homicide probe looking into the deaths of Milly Main, two other children, and a 73-year-old woman at the hospital campus. The death last year of Molly Cuddihy is also being investigated by the Crown Office.
The Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) campus, which includes the QEUH and the Royal Hospital for Children, opened to patients in 2015 at a cost of £840 million. However, within a few years, a number of patient deaths and infections led to concerns about the water and ventilation systems, prompting the public inquiry.
As the final sessions of the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry approach, these latest admissions and ongoing investigations have only heightened the urgency for answers and accountability regarding the troubling issues that have plagued these healthcare facilities.
