A leading hospital safety expert is calling for a full risk assessment of Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, directly challenging official claims that the building is safe. His warning comes as Scotland’s most expensive hospital continues to face fresh scrutiny over ventilation failures, patient deaths, and a decade of systemic cover-ups.
A Hospital That Was Never Quite Right
The Queen Elizabeth University Hospital opened in April 2015 at a cost of £842 million, making it the largest NHS construction project ever publicly funded in Scotland. The 1,677-bed campus in the Govan area of Glasgow was meant to be a showpiece for modern healthcare.
It never quite lived up to that promise.
From the very start, the building had serious problems with its water and ventilation systems. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde has since admitted the hospital faced “challenges linked to the original build quality” from the day it opened.
The ventilation numbers alone are alarming. Ventilation rates across the hospital were operating at around 2.5 to 3 air changes per hour, well below the Scottish healthcare recommended levels for vulnerable patients. Some specialist wards require up to 10 air changes per hour. Not a single ward in the entire hospital meets current national design standards on ventilation.
A whistleblower put it bluntly: the systems “cannot be validated for the wards as they are non-compliant with the requirements” of the national healthcare ventilation standard.
Deaths, Infections and Years of Denial
The human cost of these failures has been devastating. Seven patient deaths at the QEUH are currently being investigated by prosecutors for potential links to the hospital environment, which could lead to corporate homicide charges against NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.
Among those who died was Milly Main, a 10-year-old girl who passed away in 2017 following a successful stem cell transplant at the Royal Hospital for Children, located on the same campus. Her mother, Kimberly Darroch, has since called for the hospital to close entirely.
Tony Dynes, 63, died in May 2021 in the hospital’s national bone marrow unit while being treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. His widow, Maureen, said she only learned after his death how serious the two infections he contracted were. One was bacterial. The other was caused by mould.
For years, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde denied that bacteria in the hospital’s water supply had any link to patient deaths. That denial finally crumbled. In closing submissions to the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry, the health board acknowledged that there was likely a “causal connection” between infections suffered by patients and the hospital environment, in particular the water system.
By that point, between 2017 and 2021, at least 84 child patients had been infected with rare bacteria while undergoing treatment, linked to contamination of the hospital’s water supply by pigeon droppings.
What the Safety Expert Actually Said
Andrew Poplett is one of the UK’s most credible voices on hospital safety engineering. He has more than 35 years of experience in the field, and he was the independent expert who wrote the technical reports on water and ventilation systems for the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry.
Both First Minister John Swinney and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde have publicly cited Poplett’s evidence to claim the hospital is now safe. But Poplett himself says that is not what he meant.
In an exclusive interview with BBC Scotland News, he said it was “incredibly difficult to give a black and white ‘safe or unsafe’ answer.” He explained the complexity of assessing risk when the patients being cared for are already seriously ill and vulnerable.
His message to officials was clear and direct.
“If you want to reassure the public that this building is safe, do a risk assessment. You don’t need to wait for a final report from the public inquiry.”
Poplett said the hospital is currently being maintained and run to a good standard, but the building itself is “sub-optimal” by design. He found it “surprising” that when the hospital was built, a decision was made to accept ventilation rates that did not meet the existing guidance on air changes per hour.
His verdict on the root cause was stark: “If you’ve built a building that is suboptimal in design, putting it right is impossible.”
He also said he did not believe the right people with the right level of expertise were involved during the design and build process. Despite this, he acknowledged that improvements had been made by the board “to the best of their ability with the facility that they have been left with.”
He noted that some specialist units already undergo regular risk assessment. But general wards across the hospital do not. His call is for that gap to be closed immediately, with ongoing assessments in place to protect vulnerable patients.
Families and Politicians Left Demanding Answers
While officials continue to insist the hospital is safe, the families of those who died are not convinced. Relatives of 27 patients who died or suffered infections at the QEUH sent a letter, signed by 91 people, directly to First Minister John Swinney asking for stronger reassurances.
The letter read: “We share one common aim. No family should ever again go through what we have.”
Fresh concerns about the building emerged as recently as March 2026, when mould and water ingress were discovered in Ward 4B, the adult bone marrow transplant unit. Rooms were sealed off and patients were moved out. Air scrubbers were deployed in the corridors to remove possible airborne contaminants while testing continued.
It is worth noting what kind of patients are treated in that ward. Bone marrow transplant patients typically have severely weakened immune systems. They depend on carefully controlled air systems to stay alive.
The scale of ongoing remediation work at the hospital speaks for itself:
- 500 fire doors are being replaced as part of a £15.7m repair programme
- Plans are being drawn up to build an entirely new adult bone marrow transplant unit
- Air scrubbers and portable filtration units are in active use in parts of the hospital
- NHS GGC launched a £73 million legal action against the original building contractors Multiplex, Capita Property and Infrastructure, and Currie and Brown in 2020
- A new Safety and Public Confidence Oversight Group was created in early 2026 to try to restore public trust
The Scottish Hospitals Inquiry concluded its oral hearings in January 2026, having heard from 186 witnesses over 29 weeks of evidence. Lord Brodie’s final report is expected later this year but no date has been set.
Inquiry counsel Fred Mackintosh KC and Craig Connal KC described the failure to listen to whistleblowers over the last decade as a “systematic failure.” They called for a rigorous risk assessment of the whole campus and recommended a limit of four people in single patient bedrooms on general wards until that assessment is done.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has pledged to verify and validate every unit and every ward if he comes to power, stating he will ensure remedial work is done even if it means temporarily closing wards.
One of the most telling details to emerge from this story is this. A hospital that cost £842 million of public money, opened nearly ten years ago, still cannot confirm to the public that every ward has been independently validated for safety. Whistleblowers reported that staff were telling patients on cancer wards not to drink the tap water and to use bottled water instead. Whether that reflects a building that has truly been fixed is a question that grieving families, safety experts, and millions of Scottish patients deserve an honest answer to. The final report from Lord Brodie will be watched very closely indeed. What do you think should happen next? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
