Something is very
GLASGOW’S Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) is once more under the political spotlight that, it sometimes seems, has been its unfortunate yet almost continual position since opening in 2015. Or even before, since it was late and over-budget even in advance of the time it went into operation.
But concerns about its budget or build costs – though ministers have yet fully to deal with them – are secondary to those which suggest failings in its primary task of improving health and safeguarding patients. Repeated concerns about poor safety and the spread of infections have dogged the campus almost since its opening. The hospital is already the subject of a public inquiry into infections linked to contaminated water and pigeon droppings, but it is clear that not only are there questions about the building, but the management and culture of QEUH.
An earlier review, published in March, concluded that the environment of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, part of the QEUH campus, may have contributed to 70 per cent of the children’s infections it considered, “probably” did in around 30 per cent, and was at least partly to blame for the deaths of two seriously ill children.
The dispiriting initial response to such claims was, in many cases, to deny that problems existed – as QEUH did recently when insisting that it had been “open and honest” with the family of Andrew Slorance after his death, though staff failed to mention his treatment for another infection, besides Covid. Even when it has become clear that there are questions to answer, the hospital has been dilatory in providing patients and their families with clear information.
This week, the Labour leader Anas Sarwar raised the cases of two more children whose deaths have been linked to avoidable infections, claiming to have been given the information by senior clinicians at the hospital afraid to speak out because staff were being “bullied and intimidated”.
These are exceptionally grave claims that will, understandably, shake patient confidence and give families who have lost loved ones in the hospital’s