By Alan Roden
“Here are the details given to me by a private whistleblower.”
It was late 2019, and Glasgow MSP Anas Sarwar had just been contacted by a clinician at the city’s newest hospital.
They claimed to have evidence of a spate of infections linked to a contaminated water supply which had been hushed up by those in charge.
Sarwar sent me a summary and one line stood out: “Twenty cases in 2017; parents weren’t informed. At least one death due to the infection.”
A death? Linked to contaminated water? In the country’s flagship hospital? This was a scarcely believable accusation.
But fed up with a culture of denial and cover-up at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC), whistleblowers had decided to put their careers on the line and find a route for the public to learn the truth.
Sarwar, then a Labour backbencher, agreed to raise it in parliament.
Proceedings that day in November 2019 started as a routine and typically dull episode of First Minister’s Questions. Conservative leader Jackson Carlaw and SNP chief Nicola Sturgeon clashed yet again over an independence referendum, and Labour’s Richard Leonard harked back to the 1970s.
Then Sarwar stood up and told the First Minister: “Something is seriously wrong at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital [QEUH] campus.”
He had no idea what an understatement that was. Whether anyone else in the chamber that day was aware of the horrors that would later come to light remains unclear.
Sarwar continued: “In one case, a child died as a result. To this day, the parents have never been told.”
That same day, a parent whose child had died at the QEUH got in touch.
“Alan, imagine it is her daughter”, a distraught Sarwar confided in a message to me. Devastatingly, it was. The parent was Kimberly Darroch, mother of Milly Main.
Milly had leukaemia from the age of five but was in remission before contracting an infection at the QEUH, and she died in 2017.
We received her death certificate so we could confirm with whistleblowers that she was the child referenced in their bombshell evidence.
Milly was only 10 when her life was cut so cruelly short. My text response to Sarwar simply reads: “Ten… Jesus.”
A day later I found myself in Kimberly’s living room in Lanark as she bravely told her story, agreeing to be interviewed by the Daily Record and the BBC in the hope that media pressure would help her uncover the truth.
Nobody in the room that day will forget her powerful testimony.
“I want an apology. I want them to admit what they have done is wrong. And I want them to admit that they’ve covered it up,” she told the Record’s Paul Hutcheon.
A simple request from a grieving mother; but it took more than six years for her to get a meaningful apology.
Eventually, last month, NHSGCC finally admitted it was likely there was a “causal connection” between infections and “the hospital environment, in particular the water system”. It offered a “sincere and unreserved” apology.
Hindered at every turn by dishonourable health board managers, justice is finally inching nearer.
A public inquiry has heard final closing statements, and – as of this month – seven deaths are now being probed for potential links to the hospital environment.
Alongside Milly, former Scottish Government official Andrew Slorance is one of the cases where police or other agencies have been asked to gather evidence.
Andrew is fondly remembered by so many of us who have worked in Scottish politics. His widow Louise, like Kimberly and many other relatives, has never given up the fight to get to the truth.
The QEUH scandal is, without doubt, one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of devolution.
To this day, nobody has been held accountable: not the NHSGGC chief executive Jane Grant, nor the chair John Brown who shamefully tried to defend his record by citing a report prepared by an organisation that he is actually a member of.
As Sarwar said in 2023, they were allowed to “walk the crime scene”.
“Hindered at every turn by dishonourable health board managers, justice is finally inching nearer”
David Threadgold, SPF chair
If justice comes – at long last – it will be thanks to all those who refused to remain silent.
Scotland’s formidable investigative journalists, such as Hannah Rodger and Lisa Summers.
The politicians who kept digging: most notably Anas Sarwar, but also former SNP Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman, who recognised the scale of the scandal and placed NHSGGC in ‘special measures’.
The whistleblowers who first spoke up, including Dr Christine Peters, Dr Theresa Inkster and Dr Penelope Redding who spoke to 1919 back in 2021.
And above all else, the families of the victims who are determined to ensure such a devastating cover-up can never happen again.
Alan Roden is a former adviser to Anas Sarwar MSP