Edinburgh Sick Kids hospital: Can parents now trust their children's lives in the hands of NHS bureaucrats?

Every day parents across the Lothians trust the lives of their children in the hands of the medical staff at the Sick Kids.

The outstanding reputation of the doctors and nurses at the famous Edinburgh hospital clearly goes before them.

But, as countless thousands of parents will testify, their calm professionalism and boundless compassion offers reassurance to families in the most desperate of situations.

They will feel badly let down by the debacle over the hospital’s £150 million new home at Little France.

Under the original plans, patients and staff were supposed to have moved in many months ago.

Today the moving in date remains almost a year away - but far worse than that has now emerged in the latest official report on the building project.

It turns out that fire doors had not been fitted in some places and other faults meant that escape routes to be used in the event of a fire risked filling up with smoke. In short, faults in the new building made it a potential firetrap.

Don’t forget that young patients came within 24 hours of being moved into the building. And they would have been in there just now if serious flaws had not been discovered in its ventilation system at the last minute.

Other troubling findings include the fact that there have not been enough suitably experienced and qualified electricians working on the project.

The cumulative effect of this growing picture of incompetence raises one very troubling question.

We trust implicitly the Sick Kids medics who care for our ill children, but can parents trust the lives of their youngsters in the hands of bungling NHS bureaucrats?