The Papers: The story that proves we should never take our press for granted

According to the Press Association there had been an outbreak of a fungus at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, only a few miles from our offices.

The date was Saturday, January 19, and I could not fully comprehend what the story was saying.

Apparently, a fungus called Cryptococcus, which is associated with bird droppings, had somehow infected very sick patients at the new £842 million hospital.

One hour later NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) announced that two patients had died due to the outbreak.

The timeline around the scandal was confusing. Initially, it appeared the incident had just happened and that it was still evolving. But it was revealed in the coming days that the incident had in fact taken place a month earlier, in mid-December.

When this emerged, along with the fact that one of the people who had died was a 10-year-old boy already battling cancer, and the other was an elderly woman, the public was understandably outraged. Politicians demanded answers but everyone was thinking the same thing, namely how could this have happened?

While the incident itself is appalling, what nagged me most of all was the month-long delay before it was publicly revealed, despite two patients dying.

Rumours had been circulating among journalists that the scandal had been discovered by a Sunday tabloid reporter, who had been planning to run it as an exclusive.

Was it pressure from the media which caused the health board to finally reveal what had happened? If not, why had management chosen to wait so long before informing the public? If those in charge had kept this quiet for a month, what else might have happened that we still didn't know?

As soon as the health secretary Jeane Freeman confirmed the fungus was a contributing factor in the death of the 10-year-old patient, I began to submit requests under Freedom of Information laws to NHSGGC.

I asked for correspondence about the Cryptococcus infections, minutes of meetings about the incident, emails and documents. But nine months and hundreds of emails later, I am still fighting to get the information released.

While I managed to obtain some information, there are still hundreds of key documents which NHSGGC refuses to hand over, stating it would not be in the public interest to release the information, or that staff would be upset if their comments made it into the press. Sometimes they said it would cost too much to look out the documents, while in other cases they have simply refused to hand them over.

After six months of investigating, I had managed to find out many things about the hospital, its construction and concerns from staff which we ran over several months. However, our coverage had one vital thing missing and that was people. Stories had become about design, complex contracts, budgets, engineering, it wasn't about the people impacted by all of it.

But that all changed when Annemarie Kirkpatrick agreed to speak. Her daughter Stevie-Jo has leukaemia, and was being treated at the QEUH at the end of last year when the outbreak happened.

She was the first person to speak publicly about the problems since the scandal first emerged, and her family's story had an instant impact as people could at last relate to another person's experience.

When The Herald on Sunday published Annemarie and Stevie-Jo's story, and told how the teenager had been left with infected lesions after contracting a bacteria from the hospital's water supply, their story was picked up across the country and the family were asked to go on the radio and TV.

Alfie Rawson and Charmaine Lacock then contacted me too, to talk about their fears while their three-year-old daughter Paige was being treated for cancer at the hospital, and that story appeared in the following day's Herald.

Last week, we published leaked documents showing that records about the £842m facility were missing or wrong, that ventilation problems may be across both the adult and children's hospital and that concerns over bone marrow transplant units were apparent just months after the hospitals opened.

While NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde were unhappy that I had been passed the reports, they continued to insist there was nothing new in them and everything had already been “fully addressed”.

The publication of these reports, along with my request on behalf of families to Jeane Freeman asking her to meet them, which appeared in The Herald, added to the pressure on the government.

Freeman had been facing calls from Scottish Labour's health spokeswoman Monica Lennon to hold a public inquiry into the scandals at Glasgow and the Sick Kids in Edinburgh, which had until this week been rejected.

But when families started backing those calls, Freeman finally conceded.

On Tuesday morning I woke to a message saying there had been rumours the health board was preparing for a public inquiry, and that afternoon Ms Freeman announced in Parliament she would agree to a full-scale, judge-led public inquiry into these sites.

I felt relieved that after months of investigation we may finally find out how and why this all went wrong.

Most of all, I felt I had achieved something for the families to whom I am so grateful for allowing me to share their stories.

So in the week where we have seen the best and worst of journalism, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves why we need it.

We need journalism to hold power to account, and to find out things that people don't want to be uncovered.

We need it to stand up for the patients who have died, or contracted infections despite the fantastic care of dedicated medical staff. For the staff who bravely blew the whistle in 2015, 2017 and 2018 had had their concerns ignored.

Most of all, we need it for the public whose taxes pay for these grandiose projects which they are entitled to expect to make their lives better – not worse.