There must be an accounting at this hospital, a justice for the lives lost

The most shocking thing about the news of special measures being imposed on Scotland’s flagship hospital was how little it shocked anyone.

Announced late on a Friday afternoon as newsrooms prepared for the weekend – as has now become the cheap, dispiriting routine – no one following the dreadful reports coming out of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital over the last year could be surprised at the emergency intervention.

It is almost unbelievable that in a modern Scotland such stories – each of them scandalous, each of them capable of generating despair and outrage in their own right – have become almost familiar.

This was meant to be the jewel in Scotland’s National Health Service, a gleaming icon of modernity and best practice. Instead, it has become a symbol of malfunction and mismanagement. A place apparently built to the wrong specifications, a hospital where even the air in the wards and water in the taps was potentially lethal.

For more than a year now, we have read such stories and, today, we add to the catalogue of deeply alarming reports to reveal how the Health and Safety Executive inspectors warned hospital staff lacked the most basic equipment and training in limiting the spread of infection.

World-leading experts suggest the management’s failures were so egregious, so abject, that prosecutions should have followed. The HSE’s report was delivered to the chief executive of Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board last November, just weeks before two deaths linked to airborne infection emerged. There have been many more deeply-worrying revelations since.

The Scottish Government is now suspiciously quick to order public inquiries, from the Edinburgh tram fiasco to the death in custody of Sheku Bayoh. The expense is, of course, eyewatering but, happily for ministers, they can take months to arrange and, for all that time, be used as an excuse for silence, for suggesting these matters, while very serious, will be fully investigated by the inquiry. Eventually.

The trick can only be used sparingly, though, and Jeane Freeman, our wearying Health Secretary, had already played it too many times before the dreadful, avoidable deaths of two young patients blamed on dirty water emerged last week.

A minister, who clearly believes her brand is built on a can-do confidence, can only claim to be sorting things out so many times – and not that many, really – before people become sceptical. We are way beyond scepticism now and most of us, looking at this beleaguered hospital on the banks of the Clyde, feel only a mixture of dismay and disbelief.

After this inquiry, probably long after the minister has gone; the project managers in charge of this build, this mess, are gone; and the executives running this hospital as patients were needlessly dying are gone, there must be a reckoning.

There is pressing need for a new urgency in the sclerotic public life of Scotland, where clocks slowly tick as public inquiries and official investigations trundle on.

There must be an accounting for the terrible errors that have been made at this hospital and a justice for the lives lost because of them.