Key Highlights
- That was what she told the Scottish hospitals inquiry in 2021, 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,” the 19-year-old said in her evidence. Molly had been 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, which are 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 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 finally admitted 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. The 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, John says.
- “The fact that Molly never got to hear those words is even more painful.”Molly Cuddihy died last August, her organs irreparably weakened by the powerful drugs used to combat the infections as well as her cancer treatment. For the past week, her father has attended in her stead to hear the concluding submissions to the public inquiry, which was ordered by the former Scottish health secretary Jeane Freeman after a number of deaths and high infection rates – as well as whistleblowers raising repeated concerns about infection control in its water and ventilation systems.
