Hospital porter died from Covid after being ‘refused’ PPE

A HOSPITAL porter died of Covid amid concerns staff were being ‘refused’ masks despite having to transport infected patients, an inquiry heard yesterday.

The Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry in Edinburgh was told porters were not given personal protective equipment (PPE) early in the pandemic.

It also heard that health bosses used sticky labels to cover use-by dates on PPE that had expired more than year previously.

Esther O’Hara, of the Unite union, told co-lead counsel Stuart Gale, KC, that one porter had died after picking up the virus.

Ms O’Hara, who works at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, said porters at several hospitals ‘were having significant challenges in being issued with PPE’ particularly in the early- and mid-stages of the outbreak.

She said the one who died was a ‘very hardworking man who volunteered for extra shifts during the pandemic’.

She told the inquiry: ‘Where Covid was suspected or known, these patients were then put onto a trolley and had to be pushed by the porters from one building to another. Porters were refused masks because they were told that if a suspected Covid or Covid-positive patient they were transporting coughed, the patient was facing away from them so they were at low risk.’

But Ms O’Hara said porters would then just walk into the potentially contaminated air, and she believed decisions were being ‘influenced by the fact that appropriate PPE was in short supply’.

She also said one senior union representative sent a photograph of a box of FFP3 masks to her after he realised that they normally didn’t have a sticky label on them.

Ms O’Hara told the hearing: ‘He decided to peel the label off, to discover that the masks were over a year out of date, and a new expiry date had been stuck over the top.’

The inquiry, before Lord Brailsford, continues.