Doctor at Glasgow's crisis-hit QEUH was ‘unable to say hospital was safe for children’

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A doctor at a Scots super hospital where a number of unexplained infections took place was unable to say the facility was safe for children, an inquiry has heard.

Dr Shahzya Chaudhury, a consultant in paediatric haematology at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, gave evidence to the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry when she admitted she had to tell mothers and fathers she did not know if their children were at risk on her wards.

The inquiry was launched in the wake of several deaths linked to infections at the state-of-the-art £860million facility, including 10-year-old Milly Main.The youngster died in 2017 after being treated for cancer at the children's hospital, which is on the same site.

Alastair Duncan KC, the inquiry’s senior counsel, asked Dr Chaudhury about an “unusual spike” in infections at the hospital and a theory that emerged during an Incident Management Team (IMT) meeting in March 2018.“My understanding was that there was potentially contamination from the water system that was potentially causing these infections in our patients, which led to the installation of point-of-use filters on taps,” she said.“I believe at the beginning the hypothesis was that it was contamination from human contact to the taps, but later organisms were found in the water in other wards where our patients and our staff hadn’t been, so a more widespread concern about water contamination was hypothesised.”More infections were recorded at QEUH a few months later and drain swabbing carried out around the hospital found bacteria linked to the infections in the drainage system, the inquiry was told.