SCOTLAND’S Health Secretary has stepped up security after a man was arrested and charged following violent threats allegedly made against her.
Holyrood magazine reported police officers have since been posted near Jeane Freeman’s constituency office in Cumnock.
The threats directly related to the issues at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) and the deaths of two children linked to contaminated water.
Ms Freeman told Holyrood: “I think the threats are a symptom of this notion that I am personally responsible for everything that happens.
“I cannot be personally responsible, but I am accountable for how well our health service performs and how well I act to resolve those areas where it’s not doing as it should do.
“This shouldn’t be about me; it should always be about the care we deliver.”
The minister said meeting the families of children at the QEUH was “one of the hardest meetings I have ever done”.
She said: “These are kids with cancer, some of whom are young adults and they were currently under treatment from that ward.
“That was heartbreaking because their account of their experience and the straightforward, perfectly legitimate questions they were asking about the safety of the environment, and therefore the safety of their child, were not being answered.
“That was genuinely heartbreaking for me because all I kept thinking was, imagine your child has cancer and you do not know whether they’re going to survive this or not and you become, as they all have done, genuinely serious experts on the cancer that their child is suffering from, what that involves, what the treatment involves, and what they need to do to guard against infections.
“Your whole life shrinks to that focus, as it absolutely should, and here comes this other burden about whether this building where your child is being cared for is safe.
“I just thought, dear God, you’ve got enough to cope with, without having unanswered questions that are perfectly legitimate about whether the building their child is in is safe.”
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde was placed in special measures in the wake of the infection scandal at the QEUH.
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