A four-year-old boy was given antibiotics to prevent a potentially deadly water infection as he received cancer treatment at a scandal-hit hospital without his family being informed of the potential danger, his father has claimed.
James Campbell started chemotherapy after the removal of a tumour caused by a rare childhood soft tissue cancer in the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Glasgow in 2018. His father, David Campbell, a chief officer in the Merchant Navy, claims he was kept in the dark over the use of a fungal antibiotic given to James to prevent a serious infection from potentially contaminated water.
Several deaths of children with cancer as well as 84 other infections have been linked to the water supply at the £842 million QEUH campus.
Campbell, 44, from Helensburgh, said he became aware of concerns over the safety of the water supply soon after James started treatment.
“I started asking questions and the nursing staff would tell me not to worry,” he told the Sunday Mail. “But you’d speak to other parents in the ward and some staff who would say there was an issue with the water. All the parents were no longer using the showers, which regularly overflowed.
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“We’d started buying big bottles of water to clean James, literally pouring the water over him at the door of the bathroom as we tried to keep him clean every time he was sick or had an accident, which could be up to six or seven times a day.
“We were even told not to wash our own hands in the basins.”
Campbell said water filters then appeared on every tap. “We were constantly being told the importance of James not getting any kind of infection,” he said. “With his immune system so compromised by the treatment it would be an infection that would kill him, not the cancer. It was like living on a knife edge all the time.”
Campbell, who gave consent for all of James’s treatments, said he was “casually” told doctors were adding another drug to his cancer treatment. The drug he was given was Posaconazole, an antibiotic prophylaxis, given as a precaution to prevent an infection. Campbell said: “We were not told why, just that it was part of his treatment plan all of a sudden. Now I know why.”
Campbell gave evidence at a public inquiry into the hospital’s practices this year. By then, inquiries were taking place into the deaths of three children, including Milly Main, ten, who died in August 2017, and a 73-year-old woman.
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James, now seven, is back at school with his cancer in remission. Campbell is one of a number of parents considering legal action. Stephanie Spencer of Thompsons Solicitors, which is representing the family, said: “A family with a critically ill child needs to have all the information t made completely clear to them and to feel the environment for life-saving treatment is safe. That this was not the case is not acceptable.”
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: “There are many scenarios when children and adults are given prophylactic treatment. At the time of James’ care, an Incident Management Team recommended prophylaxis for a number of immune-compromised children as a form of preventative treatment.”
