'Demeaned and smeared'

Families' fury at NHS scandal in Glasgow

- Libby Brooks Scotland correspondent

All Molly Cuddihy had wanted was recognition of what she had gone through.

That was what she told the Scottish hospitals inquiry in 2021, then aged 19, where she described the “frightening” fits and rigors she had suffered after contracting a bacterial infection at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth university hospital while undergoing chemotherapy. “I was made sicker by the environment,” she said in her evidence. Molly was 15 and revising for her national 5 exams when she was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. She was treated at the Royal hospital for children and the adjacent QEUH, both part of a six-year public inquiry that reached its final stages, and heard devastating new admissions, this week.

"You had a critically ill teenager who could see what was materially wrong with the hospital building in 2018,” said her father, John. He said the clinical care his daughter had received was “world-class” - a sentiment echoed by all the families affected by this scandal - but “the basic principles of providing a safe and secure environment in which those clinicians could operate were simply absent”.

After years of denial, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) finally admitted earlier this week that serious infections in 84 child cancer patients, two of whom died, were probably caused by a contaminated water system at its flagship hospital. This arduous delay in accepting what patients, families and whistleblowers had been telling hospital and health board management since the £842m super-hospital first opened in 2015 piled “avoidable distress and harm” on already suffering families, said John. “The fact that Molly never got to hear those words is even more painful.”

Molly died last August, her organs irreparably weakened by the powerful drugs used to combat the infections as well as her cancer treatment.