Sturgeon must cure ills of health service

WITH extraordinary arrogance, Nicola Sturgeon has sought to present the SNP as the custodian of state-funded healthcare.

Now we learn of disturbing claims that a child being treated for cancer died after contracting an infection at a flagship £842million hospital.

Damningly, a whistleblower has claimed the child’s parents were not informed of the findings of an investigation into the death.

Up to 26 cases of water supply infections in children in the cancer wards were logged in 2017, in a building that opened only four years ago.

The insider has told Labour MSP Anas Sarwar that one of these children died after contracting an infection at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow (QEUH).

Ministers have already ordered public inquiries into the construction of the QEUH, and the Sick Children’s Hospital in Edinburgh. But the official response to the latest allegations does not inspire confidence in the performance of the health board, or of the Scottish Government.

NHS bosses have refused to confirm any of the facts surrounding the case in detail, in another example of a deeply entrenched secrecy culture.

This obfuscation can only compound the sense of cover-up and mismanagement; without the whistleblower’s intervention, details of this incident may never have emerged.

And yet Miss Sturgeon has spent much of the election campaign grandstanding about independence, and this week threatened to take ITV to court to secure a place in its leaders’ debate next week.

Last week, she published plans for legislation to prevent the NHS from becoming a pawn in post-Brexit trade negotiations with the US.

This was an exercise in posturing – and the height of hypocrisy from a politician whose boasts about protecting our health service grow more hollow by the day.

Miss Sturgeon should stop the histrionics and sort out the mess in the NHS before public confidence in the standard of patient care is irrevocably damaged.