Ebola nurse Pauline Cafferkey has said she was “hung out to dry” by health officials who cleared her to fly to Scotland to cover up the fact that their failure to detect the virus put lives at risk.

The 40-year-old she was “made a scapegoat for a catalogue of errors” by Public Health England (PHE), who were responsible for checking her on her return from Sierra Leone in 2014.

Speaking for the first time since being cleared of wrongdoing at a Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) hearing in Edinburgh last week, she said the PHE officials who pointed the finger of blame at her should now be investigated.

Among the failures she highlighted were a shortage of screening kits at the Heathrow Airport centre where she was examined, doctors and nurses being told to take each other’s temperatures and officials failing to contact experts because they had the wrong telephone number after she highlighted her elevated temperature.

The nurse, from Cambuslang near Glasgow, arrived at Heathrow in December 2014 after six weeks nursing Ebola sufferers in the West African country.

She and 50 other medical staff were given an Ebola assessment form on which their temperature and other information was to be recorded, but the NMC hearing heard the screening area was “busy, disorganised and even chaotic”.