SCOTLAND’S biggest health board is to launch legal action against a private contractor involved in the building of a crisis-hit hospital.
The flagship Queen Elizabeth University Hospital cost £575 million and opened in 2015.
But the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) facility is now under “special measures” over concerns about infection prevention there. They arose after the deaths of patients from infections linked to pigeon droppings and water contamination at the site.
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Milly Main, 10, was in remission from cancer when she contracted an infection at the Royal Hospital for Children (RHC) there and died days later in 2017.
Health board bosses have now recommended court proceedings against construction firm Brookfield Multiplex.
At an NHSGGC board meeting yesterday, chief executive Jane Grant revealed lawyers have been instructed to prepare legal action against the contractor “as a matter of urgency”.
Papers seen by journalists, which the health board failed to publish ahead of the meeting, recommend board members “accept the legal advice received and require the chief executive to instruct MacRoberts LLP to act on the board’s behalf to raise appropriate court proceedings as a matter of urgency.”
The move comes one week after Health Secretary Jeane Freeman revealed that reports on infection risks at the hospital had been kept from the Scottish Government. The secret papers include one on water contamination risks that was commissioned by NHS Estates in 2015.
Responding to the latest news, Glasgow Labour MSP Anas Sarwar said: “This hospital was commissioned by the health board, the building was overseen by the health board, it was signed off by the health board despite warnings about the high risk of infection, it was opened by the health board and the infections scandal was subsequently covered up by the health board.
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“If senior managers are now accepting there were problems with the hospital, who is going to take responsibility for opening it and putting patients at risk?
“At the heart of this scandal is not a contractual arrangement, but a catalogue of failings and a cover-up by hospital managers which led to a child losing their life.”
NHS GCC was escalated to stage four of the NHS Board Performance Framework by Freeman last month following its response to the infection scandal, with two children believed to have died in an affected ward in 2017.
In Scotland, a five-stage scale is used to show the level of oversight for health boards whose performance is under par.
Miles Briggs, the Scottish Conservative health spokesman, said: “This is another depressing twist in a sorry saga, created by the SNP Government’s mismanagement of a major hospital building project.
“This legal action will not reassure patients or staff or reduce the chances of infection at the hospital.”
Raising the prospect of further action concerning the long-delayed opening of the children’s hospital in Edinburgh, he added: “If Multiplex has also failed to deliver on their contract of building a safe new hospital at the Sick Kids in Edinburgh, which there is a strong argument for, then NHS Lothian should not rule out similar legal action.
“SNP ministers have shown a total inability to manage the contracts for the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, and it is a travesty that we are in the position that we are.
“Millions of pounds that could have been gone into lifesaving treatments and reducing waiting times is being lost every month because of this fiasco.”
Freeman has apologised to the families of Milly Main and three-year-old Mason Djemat, who also died after being admitted for treatment at the RHC.
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