Sickening scandal at the brilliant hospital which saved my life
THE disaster at the new Sick Kids hospital in Edinburgh is a full-on scandal. The SNP is trying to dismiss calls for a public inquiry but that is where we should be headed. Years late and with the estimated build price spiralling from £150 million to nearly half a billion in lifetime costs, this is now on a par with the Holyrood building saga and Edinburgh tram fiasco.
Both ended up with full public inquiries. I am sure the fact that Nicola Sturgeon was the health secretary at the time when many of the problems were baked into the hospital plans has nothing whatsoever to do with the Scottish Government’s reasons for resisting.
But let’s put aside the fact that an empty hospital, which should have been opened in the autumn of 2017, is costing the NHS £1.4 million a month in repayments.
It would be churlish to discuss the hundreds of nurses and doctors who were told to make arrangements to move workplace, plan their commute and change their shifts only for those plans to be cancelled at the last minute.
And let’s not examine the fact an estimated 300,000 children have been treated in A&E at the cramped old hospital in the time since the new one was supposed to have opened its doors.
No, let’s talk about something more fundamental – why the actual hospital a patient is treated in, not just the treatment they receive, is so important.
When I was five years old I was knocked down by a truck on the main road outside my house.
I broke my leg, fractured my pelvis, crushed my femoral artery, severed the main nerve down the front of my right leg and sustained so much internal damage that my mother was told I might never be able to have children.
AFTER being initially stabilised at Kirkcaldy’s Victoria Hospital, in Fife, I was immediately sent to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh for eight hours of surgery to save my life, reconstruct the artery, return the blood flow to the bottom half of my body (which had started turning black) and attempt to save my right leg.
When I talk of the old Sick Kids site at Sciennes, I speak from experience as I spent a large chunk of my childhood there.
There was the recuperation, lying day after day with my leg in traction – and there was the mayhem on the ward after my aunt gave me a set of paper art straws to keep me occupied. I promptly found a way to weaponise them by creating a blow-dart system of putting cut-up thin straws inside the wider ones and spraying paper bullets all over the floor.
Days turned to weeks, and I was in there so long a woman came to start teaching me homework so I didn’t fall behind in school.
I was wheeled out in front of the hospital’s lecture theatre, full of medical students, as the professor used me as a case study to explain the new type of leg setting they had tried on my twisted limbs. Released home in a full body cast – in plaster from my armpits to my toes like some laid-flat Egyptian mummy – I had to come back for the circular saw to crack the cast open.
Appointment after appointment followed for physiotherapy, rehabilitation and checks that the leg that was wasted and stunted had started to grow again to catch up with the ‘good’ leg.
I made friends on the ward with the other long-term patients. My sister, who was usually bored at visiting time, enjoyed a game of running outside to fetch objects that a dialysis patient entertained himself with by chucking out of the third-floor window.
The food was terrible. My leg hurt all the time. I couldn’t see the TV from my bed so I was often restless and under-stimulated.
But for all that, I love the Sick Kids and I’ve continued to have a relationship with it.
My sister spent so much time being dragged along to my childhood medical appointments that she ended up training to become a doctor. Her student flat was two streets away, so she often used to study in the hospital’s library – I’d often stop by and leave little care packages of Maltesers or Minstrels on her desk.
As an adult, I’ve made flying visits to drop off a hot dinner to a friend staying at the bedside of their son, so that they could get a proper meal rather than spend another night eating the vending machine’s sandwiches.
As a mother, I’ve had to take my baby, Finn, there after my GP was worried his jaundice wasn’t fading and wanted a second opinion from a specialist.
The hospital is so tied up in my family history that when, as a naughty 12-year-old, I was nosily rooting about my dad’s study and uncovered my parents’ wills, it made perfect sense to read that, should my sister and I not survive their death, everything would be given to the hospital.
My accident was 35 years ago and the hospital was scuffed and fraying at the edges even back then. Having seen and experienced the building as an adult I can attest that – as much as I love the place – it really is done.
And it matters that patients, parents and staff have a good working building.
One where the nurses’ station has a clear line of sight to each bed.
One where the temperature can be controlled so patients aren’t freezing in winter or boiling in summer despite every window being flung open (thus allowing teenage kidney patients to throw things out).
IT matters that when panicking parents are sent to A&E, there’s a place for them to sit cradling their sick child – not standing about in hallways because the waiting rooms resemble overflowing war zones.
It matters that you can get a pushchair through the doors, and that there’s a place to park them once inside. And when you are a child and in pain, scared and on your own because mum and dad have had to head home after visiting time, it matters that you can see the TV to drown out the loneliness.
At bedtime, it matters if you can get over to sleep rather than stay awake, scared by unexplained rattles and groans from the windows and the creaking building.
I love the old Sick Kids. It put me back together again when I was broken.
But the building is done, and it is an utter scandal that a generation of children who were promised treatment in a shiny new hospital, fit for purpose, with enough room, decent temperature control, nearby parking, appropriate waiting areas and fresh, clean wards, have been squashed into a building that is many years past its prime.
Hundreds of thousands of our country’s most vulnerable, sick, injured and ill children were promised better.
They’ve been sold short and at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. Time for that public inquiry, Nicola.