Senior paediatrician describes ‘mystery’ of infections at superhospital

Sly Saint · Sep 24, 2024 at 5:53 PM

A senior paediatrician said he could not imagine a more serious concern than “mystery” outbreaks of infection at a superhospital, an inquiry heard.

Dr Alan Mathers, chief of medicine for women and children’s services at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHS GGC), began working at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in June 2015, as clinical director of obstetrics and gynaecology.

He then became the chief of medicine at Royal Hospital for Children, in the same campus, and said there were initially concerns about rooms used to treat children requiring a bone marrow transplant.

Both hospitals are being investigated at the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry in a bid to establish if design and construction contributed to deaths linked to infections.

Dr Mathers described QEUH as a “cathedral to medicine” due to its size, and said he hoped the inquiry would improve how hospitals should be built.

Giving evidence, he said that during 40 years working for the NHS, he had seen several infection outbreaks, but medics in the QEUH campus were seeing “novel organisms”.

He added: “They were things which were not in the clinical memory.”

Dr Mathers told the inquiry concerns began in 2015 regarding fungal infections, but “mutated” by 2017 to concerns about the wider environment, and said he was aware of issues with water in two other Glasgow hospitals.

The inquiry heard that by 2019, additional prophylaxis drugs were being prescribed to child patients, but Dr Mathers said he was unable to say whether parents had been told of concerns about the hospital environment.

In August 2019 he was invited to a meeting about Haemato-oncology at QEUH, which turned into a discussion around the chairing of infection management team (IMT) meetings, but said he found them “to be conducted professionally”.

In a statement, he said: “I have experienced many infection clusters during my career. The issue of concern was the lack of a readily identifiable cause and set of effective mitigations. Once an infection occurred, treatment was delivered but the underlying mystery remained.”
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Senior paediatrician describes ‘mystery’ of infections at superhospital (msn.com)

posting because such 'mystery infections' happen; they are not mass-hysteria as Wessely would have everyone believe.

Amw66 · Sep 24, 2024 at 7:51 PM

Mmm. Unexpected and diverse infections , not so much as mystery . The sheer variety driven in no small way by " value engineering" of services contracts and lack of supervision during construction .
Blame game and cover ups abound, and few will come out of the inquiry with reputations intact.

One of the services engineers on some of my project teams has been an expert witness .A lot of his work is sorting out problems when things don't perform as anticipated. He literally could not believe what he was hearing.

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Senior paediatrician describes ‘mystery’ of infections at superhospital

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