How Queen Elizabeth University Hospital scandal has hit vaccination rates in Scotland
The most pressing challenge for the SNP is to restore patients’ lost faith in Scotland’s hospitals and health boards
David Campbell was already experiencing a parent's worst nightmare when a passing conversation with a hospital worker added a new dimension of fear.
In 2018, David's four-year-old son James, who had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, was on Ward 2A in the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. It had been opened with fanfare three years earlier, and Schiehallion, as Ward 2A was known, was on the surface the ideal place for a child battling cancer, with its play area, cinema room and kitchen for parents to come together.
But David told the Sunday Times that a cleaner warned the family to ask for bottled water, telling them: “I wouldn't let my dog drink the water in here.” Knowing that infections could be fatal for cancer patients, David took to cleaning his son with wet wipes and bottled water.
Missing warning signs
He reflected in the interview that the cleaner's tip-off could have been the difference between life and death. Of course, everything is clearer with hindsight. But you have to wonder how many more lives might have been saved if those at the top had listened.
Instead, the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry saw those with the most power compete to claim they were ignorant of the whole affair. Even where mechanisms to inform the most senior people were embedded, such as a healthcare infection incident assessment tool – otherwise known as a HIIAT – it seems that ministers ignored the signals they were being sent.
Between 2015 and 2018, the HIIAT system alerted the Scottish Government to 14 serious infection outbreaks at the QEUH. Yet as late as January 2018, such was the complacency that the then Health Secretary Shona Robison accused Anas Sarwar of “talking down our first class state-of-the-art hospital” when he voiced patient complaints about conditions there.
It was as if, having cut the ribbon on a shiny new hospital, the SNP could not countenance the fact there could be something wrong with it. Indeed, at the time, the details of hospital buildings and ventilation changes may have seemed dry reading to those chasing headlines.
But families like David’s knew infections could be fatal to immunocompromised cancer patients. In the interview, he described the terror he felt when James relapsed and they had to return to the QEUH last year.
Vaccination rates in decline
And here is the most pressing challenge for John Swinney and co – repairing patients’ faith in Scotland’s hospitals and health boards. Parents like David may feel they have no choice but to return, even if it means being on edge at all times.
So much of modern medicine relies on trust. The link between vaccine uptake and trust in authority is well-documented – and in Scotland, childhood vaccination rates are already declining.
Fred Mackintosh, counsel to the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry, warned in his closing submission that the whole hospital ventilation system had still not been validated. I have called in parliament for the Scottish Government to make this a priority, but it must also listen to the lived experience of families like David’s if it is to make hospitals welcoming for them again.
After so much cover-up and secrecy, that is the least those in power can do.
Jackie Baillie is MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader and her party’s spokesperson for health
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