THE father of a boy being treated for cancer said he believes his child was given a “secret” supply of disease-prevention drugs amid a period of “covered-up” hospital-acquired infections at a children’s cancer ward.
David Campbell’s son was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer in August 2018 when he was four years old. The boy was being treated in the Royal Hospital for Children (RHC) and Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) campus in Glasgow which are at the centre of an inquiry into problems that contributed to the deaths of two children.
Campbell told the inquiry his son was given a “cocktail” of antifungals and prophylactics as part of his cancer treatment “as a precaution in case anything should crop up”, before he was aware of the hospital hygiene concerns.
But after reading reports about water contamination at RHC in the media, he began to raise questions about the extra supply of antifungals to children in the cancer ward.
He told the inquiry he was not told about one of the drugs – posaconazole – being part of his son’s medical plan, adding “if I ever was, then it was not fully explained why and what the gravity of taking it would be”.
He said: “All we got was a generic handout put under the door to say that it was a medication that the children were going to be put on as protocol, it was better to be safe than sorry.”
Campbell said in hindsight he recognised the drug potentially helped his son fight off a hospital-acquired infection, but said his child should have been in a sterile and safe environment.
“It doesn’t make it right, giving them an anti-venom and letting the snake keep biting away at them,” he added.
Earlier this year, an independent review found the deaths of two children at the QEUH campus were at least in part the result of infections linked to the hospital environment.
It found a third of these infections were “most likely” to have been linked to the hospital environment.
The inquiry in Edinburgh, chaired by Lord Brodie, continues. Health boards are due to give their evidence at a later date.
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