Malcolm Chisholm, Minister for Health from 2001 to 2004
Where was Gordon Brewer in 2003 when Labour-run Scotland’s hospitals were filthy and under-staffed? Who was the Secretary of State for Health. Did his head have to roll?
From the Guardian on June 21st 2003:
A survey a few weeks ago found that 40% of Scottish hospital wards do not have enough nurses. Those in the rest of the UK fare little better. Overstretched staff run from bed to bed, and in the frenzy of a busy acute medical or surgical ward, often fail to wash their hands between patients. Doctors also un wittingly spread infection – a recent survey found that only a tiny minority of doctors clean their stethoscope between patients, thereby spreading bacteria from the skin of one patient to the next.
A few weeks ago, a 52-year-old woman died from a hospital superbug at Monklands hospital in Airdrie, coinciding with the findings of a fivefold increase in deaths from MRSA over a five-year period. This has thrown the topic of superbugs back into the limelight. Martha Devlin contracted MRSA after surgery last September, but the superbug mutated further to become GISA – Glycopeptide-Intermediate Staphylococcus Aureus – a strain resistant even to the few drugs used to treat MRSA.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/jan/21/NHS.lifeandhealth
From the Independent on 27th May 2002
A new superbug that can neutralise antibiotics and cause fatal blood poisoning has been detected at one of Scotland’s most modern hospitals. The extended spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBL) superbug has already claimed the life of one patient at Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire. Now health chiefs have admitted infection controls must be tightened at hospitals across the country to combat the threat it poses.
A study by Dr Dugald Baird, a microbiologist at Hairmyres, found a total of 41 patients contracted the bacteria. Lanarkshire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust refused to confirm that a patient had died as a result of the bug.
Why have I used two English newspapers as sources? I’m guessing that Google hasn’t found Scottish sources because they weren’t that keen to upset their pals, sometimes husbands, maybe dads, in Scottish Labour?
Neither article suggests a crisis in public confidence or calls for resignations. Did the opposition parties?
Where was Gordon Brewer in 2002/2003 as these stories broke? He was in just the right place as presenter of ‘Holyrood’ and then ‘Political Scotland’ from 1999 and 2007.
I see from his wiki entry that he was a member of the International Communist League at Edinburgh University in the 1970s and then the Trotskyist group the Socialist Organiser. I’m guessing he knew Lord John Reid and Lord Alistair Darling in their more proletarian ‘donkey-jacket days’ back then.
There was, of course, another equally dramatic candidate for a ‘crisis in public confidence’ in 2003 when it became apparent that Scottish Labour knew and concealed the truth about contaminated blood products:
Lisa Summers investigated this again in 2019 but found no reason to accuse Scottish Labour of anything:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-48829340
I see no sign of Brewer in this but he did discuss the theory that a polio vaccine using tissue from primates could have been behind the leap made by the human immunodeficiency virus – HIV – from apes and monkeys.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
There was some reporting of this issue in the Scottish press during those years particularly in relation to MRSA infections.
https://www.scotsman.com/news-2-15012/revealed-scotland-s-most-mrsa-prone-hospitals-1-551854
I remember the growing number of such reports but not any calls for anyone to resign
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Thanks. Couldn’t find that myself.
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