NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde accused of 'spying' on MSPs and members of its own staff

Taxpayers cash spent on ‘social listening’

Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. Image: NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

Scotland’s largest health board has been accused of using taxpayers’ cash to spy on MSPs and its own members of staff.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde used the money to secretly monitor 31 MSPs, including First Minister Humza Yousaf, former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, and Labour’s deputy leader Jackie Ballie.

The vast majority of MSPs representing the Glasgow and West of Scotland regions are also being watched by the crisis-hit health board.

According to The Mail on Sunday this monitoring, which the health board has called “social listening”, is carried out by a private contract worth around £15,000 a year.

It began in April 2022 when the health board faced a number of scandals such as dangerous infections and the deaths of patients, and is expected to run until 2025.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said the monitoring was part of activities connected to “managing cases of infection at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH)” in Govan.

The health board said their monitoring extended to three of its own members of staff and a “member of the public”.

It would not confirm who these individuals are, however media reports last month said Louise Slorance, whose husband Andrew died at the QEUH in 2020 while waiting for a stem cell transplant, discovered her social media was being monitored by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

Ms Slorance said spending taxpayer money on this is “obscene” and should instead “be spent on patient care”.

Mr Sarwar said: “This is yet another astonishing revelation from this scandal-ridden health board.

“Our NHS is at breaking point, but NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is spending taxpayer money spying on their own staff, bereaved families and on politicians raising concerns.

“This health board’s leadership have shown time and time again that they are not willing to take responsibility for the awful tragedies that occurred on their watch.

“They will go to any lengths to try to cover up their catastrophic failures.

“They need to go.”

In a statement NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: “We want to make clear that we have never used private investigators to spy on patients and their families.

“The practice we use, called social media listening, plays a key role in issues management for companies and organisations worldwide by offering access to publicly available online and social conversations through legitimate software companies, such as the Meltwater platform, which is used by more than 27,000 global customers, including NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

“In monitoring public conversations surrounding our organisation through social listening, we erroneously reviewed public individual posts shared by the relative of a patient.

“This was an isolated case, for which we have since apologised to the individual, and we have ceased all such monitoring.

“Whilst we were responding and managing the cases of infection at QEUH, there was a number of online conversations on social media.

“This included comments that were misinformed, and this impacted on our ability to inform and communicate effectively with families.

“It would be very costly and resource-intensive for us to have an overview of all conversations taking place on social media about NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde manually.

“Social listening software is a way to automate this and monitor public opinion.”