A worker at a hospital where nine people died of Clostridium difficile said that it was “highly likely” many patients contracted the superbug needlessly because managers did not act quickly enough.

The worker said that managers at Vale of Leven Hospital in Dumbartonshire failed to stop new admissions after the outbreak or isolate infected patients.

The worker, who did wish to be named, also claimed that the hospital did not have the facilities to deal with the number of infected patients and had only one infection control nurse, leaving no evening or weekend cover.

A recent investigation found that 54 patients contracted C. difficile at the hospital since December last year. The superbug caused the deaths of nine patients and was implicated in the deaths of nine others.

“Wards eventually were closed to new admissions, but staff had been questioning why wards weren't being closed to new admissions,” the worker told the BBC.

“Later on, down the line, management did indeed close wards to new admissions. It took a while.”

The allegations against Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board angered the relatives of those who died at the hospital.

Michelle Stewart, whose mother-in-law succumbed to C.difficile in February, said: “They did shut the ward to children but they were still admitting patients. People have lost lives through total negligence.”

Tom Divers, the chief executive of Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board, said that the unusually high number of cases of C. difficile at the hospital did not come to light because of a failure to pull together information from the hospital wards.

He conceded that the hospital had limited facilities for isolating patients, but said that when it was necessary, patients were transfered to single accommodation for treatment.

Mr Divers said that he was “disappointed and concerned” by the hospital worker's allegations. No such concerns had been highlighted, he said, in interviews with all the senior consultants, nurses and infection control staff.

“If a senior member of our clinical team felt that was the case and that there was a material risk, then it was that individual's responsibility to bring that forward and make that known.”

Mr Divers acknowledged that mistakes had been made: “No doubt there have been shortcomings and I bitterly regret those. If it turns out there have been fundamental shortcomings which should have been acted on previously that had not been acted on by senior management then, certainly, I will apologise."

A spokesman for the Scottish government called on the hospital worker to give evidence to the inquiry into the Vale of Leven outbreak.

“It is important that the inquiry receives information from everyone who can help, the information could be given on a confidential basis,” the spokesman said.

Opposition parties criticised the government for failing to ensure that the hospital had an effective system for monitoring disease and for not matching new measures introduced in England for tackling such outbreaks.

Senior health officials at the Health Protection Agency reportedly raised concerns in February about “the lack of guidance in Scotland” on how hospitals should tackle C. difficile.

Professor Hugh Pennington said that the guidance would have helped: “Bugs don't stop at Gretna. But the Department for Health in Scotland appears to have been far more laid-back than their counterparts in England. This guidance would have made a difference.”

Margaret Curran, Labour's health spokeswoman, said: “The reporting system for C. difficile at the Vale of Leven hospital was so inadequate it did not even allow doctors to aggregate the number of cases in each ward.

“If the Minister [Nicola Sturgeon, the Health Secretary] had acted on the advice of officials at Health Protection Scotland and implemented new surveillance guidelines, at the same time as the NHS in England, lives could potentially have been saved.” In a separate outbreak, a fourth case of C. difficile was confirmed at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow. Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board said: “The patients associated with the ward are all being nursed in isolation, and none are giving cause for concern as a result of C-diff. Standard additional cleaning and strict infection control measures have been implemented.”

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