30 years on, professor fell victim to a deadly legacy of grim Scots hospitals

EXPOSURE to asbestos in "grim" Glasgow hospitals killed a Scottish medical professor 30 years later, an inquest has found.

• Southern General Hospital

Dr Kieran Sweeney died from a rare form of lung cancer triggered by breathing in dust and debris from pipe lagging at the Royal Infirmary and Southern General Hospital, where he worked in the late 1970s, the hearing in Exeter was told.

The professor, who was born in Glasgow but moved to England in 1979, was diagnosed with lung cancer mesothelioma in 2008. The chances of developing such a rare tumour without having been exposed to asbestos are one in a million, according to experts.

Two weeks before he died on Christmas Eve 2009, Dr Sweeney, who was 58, wrote to his lawyers to say he had been exposed to asbestos in the medical block at the 19th-century "old and somewhat grim stone-built" Southern General.

He wrote that there were "miles and miles of pipework on the exterior of walls", through which hot water and other utilities ran, and that during his time at the two hospitals he saw teams of tradesmen in blue boiler suits and overalls working on them.

Dr Sweeney wrote that they removed the lagging to repair the pipes in the corridors, which were "generally dirty" and filled with old and decrepit pipes and debris.

He explained that on two or three occasions, while working at the hospital in the late 1970s, he saw tradesmen working in the medical block on the pipes.

At Friday's hearing in Exeter, Devon, which was attended by Dr Sweeney's widow, Barbara, deputy coroner Darren Salter said an inquest was being held because the professor's death was not due to natural causes, but to industrial disease.

Mr Salter said the post-mortem examination revealed the cause of death to be mesothelioma due to the exposure to asbestos. He said Dr Sweeney had felt 'perfectly well' apart from a "tickly cough" in October 2008.

Mr Salter said: "In February 2009 he had chemotherapy, but that had little effect on proceedings. By June, he had his last chemotherapy and Dr Sweeney decided not to have any more treatment, other than paliation."

A report by Dr Robin Rudd, a London-based consultant physician and leading expert on mesothelioma, said other medical and nursing staff at several other hospitals around the country had suffered similar circumstances.

Dr Sweeney, who was a father of four and the son of a doctor, was an honorary professor of general practice at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry in the West Country and a GP in one of the very few nurse-led practices in the UK.He was a fellow of the Royal College of GPs and the Royal Society of Arts, a health correspondent for the Times newspaper and an adviser to the Department of Health's Commission for Health Improvement.

In an obituary, his son Mike, 22, wrote: "His writings were underpinned by a compassion based understanding of medicine. He envisaged the virtuous doctor as one who acted with empathy as well as rigour and responsibility.

"He will be remembered for his commitment to the practice and teaching of clinically excellent and compassionate care - fuelled in the last 14 months of his life by his personal experience as a cancer patient. He was very well known for his professional and personal humility and had a very high regard for the contribution of nursing to patients."

One of Dr Sweeney's final articles documented his own treatment as a patient and advised medical personnel to refrain from poor attempts at humour.

In an article published by the British Medical Journal in July 2009, he wrote: "Please can we avoid crass attempts at humour?

"There is nothing funny about clutching a plastic bag with all your clothes in, except your pants, socks and shoes - just stop and think what it must be like - while trying to secure a hospital gown around you, and following, like some faithful gun dog, a radiology attendant who without introduction commands you, with a broad grin to acknowledge his witty lack of grammar, to 'follow I'." He added: "What I have always feared in illness was anonymity, being packaged, losing control, not being able to say 'this is who I am'."

A Greater Glasgow Health Board spokesman said: "It would be inappropriate for us to comment."