Sister says nurse, currently in a serious condition with complications arising from Ebola virus, was sent home from GP out-of-hours clinic

The family of Pauline Cafferkey, the Scottish nurse who was diagnosed with Ebola in December and fell ill again last week with complications related to the disease, have accused NHS staff of “major failings”.

Pauline Cafferkey was admitted to the Queen Elizabeth University hospital in Glasgow on Tuesday and was later flown by military aircraft to the Royal Free hospital in London. She spent three weeks in an isolation unit there at the start of the year after contracting Ebola while volunteering in Sierra Leone.



Her family have now claimed doctors missed an opportunity to diagnose that she had fallen ill with an Ebola-related condition up to 24 hours before it was eventually recognised.

Toni Cafferkey said her sister went to an out-of-hours GP clinic at the New Victoria hospital in Glasgow on Monday night where the doctor who assessed her diagnosed a virus and sent her home.

She said: “At that point, me and my family believe they missed a big opportunity to give the right diagnosis and we feel she was let down. Instead of being taken into hospital, she spent the whole of Tuesday very ill.

“It is absolutely diabolical the way she has been treated … We don’t know if the delays diagnosing Pauline have had an adverse effect on her health, but we intend to find out. It has not been good enough.”

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, she added: “We think there have been major failings and we just want her to pull through. This kind of recurrence seems to be rare but we don’t yet know enough about it.”

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: “We can confirm that Pauline did attend the New Victoria hospital GP out-of-hours service on Monday. Her management and the clinical decisions taken based on the symptoms she was displaying at the time were entirely appropriate. All appropriate infection control procedures were carried out as part of this episode of care.”

A statement from the Royal Free confirmed that Cafferkey had been transferred to the hospital “due to an unusual late complication of her previous infection by the Ebola virus”, and she remained in a serious condition.

In a recent interview with ITV’s Lorraine Kelly about learning that she had the virus, Cafferkey said: “Outwardly I just tried to be stoical about everything but inside, obviously, I was very frightened.



“I knew it could have gone three ways – it could have been mild, it could have been severe, which it was with me, and it could have been death, the other outcome which I came very close to.”