Harrowing account of Martha Mill's death at 13 in Guardian today

[StaplesCorner]

I don't think there's another thread on this already I did a search, but I think this needs to be widely read - there seems to have been no lack of NHS resources here whatsoever, but consultants' arrogance by the spade; shades of This is Going to Hurt? Every parents' worst nightmare:

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/sep/03/13-year-old-daughter-dead-in-five-weeks-hospital-mistakes

Simply telling consultants they need to be nicer or have more humility won't fix much if anything.

Looking at the article from an outsiders POV there's appears to been a whole problem with the management chain (for example too much of the decision making being left in the hands of one individual and no formal mechanism for a challenge)), poor communications and it would appear the nursing staff didn't feel particularly empowered ....whether that's replicated across the whole of the NHS I don't know.

i am so sorry @Sillybeagle

The most eloquent, heart breaking article I've ever read. It should be compulsory reading for every consultant, doctor, nurse and trainee medics. I suspect it would be more powerful than a few tweaks to management policy

privatising would not make any difference, the doctors would still be arrogant, there would still be hierarchy

So many posters sharing their own accounts some of whom have lost a child or relative. I don’t know what to say; maybe just that it’s important to have this discussion here, to use this as a forum and for those who’ve also been harmed or bereaved to be able to bear witness. A “me too” moment.

One of the worst things I have read for a while but also one of the best-written pieces I've read for a while too.

The fact that Martha was in hospital, one of the best. Surrounded by the best clinicians. Well-educated parents who, of course, listened to what they were told. When they tried to put their heads above the parapet they were called stressed, anxious. It really could have been any one of us. Terrifying.

I'd just read the article, beautifully written and heartbreaking. I cried reading it and am sure many others did too. That poor family

It's difficult to imagine how hard they would have had to push to get her transferred to icu. I've just spent two weeks in hospital with a family member who was initially misdiagnosed (wrong xray done!) and I have learnt that you have to fully immerse yourself in what tests / scans are being done, ask to see them, Google what they mean, ask questions, be ever present , ask to see each specialist involved every single day, not care that the nurses hate you. It's exhausting. And the ward was full of elderly people with no one visiting or advocating for them. It's heartbreaking . The same relative had a condition a few years ago that a specialist told me no longer really existed in the UK - but the signs were all there and I was right. If I hadn't had the self belief to push so hard (including against family who thought I was interfering )my relative would have died .

I've had a lot of treatment myself in the past and never thought to question it though.

So true.

I remember my Mum - who was terminally ill with bowel cancer and having some horrendous times in hospital - saying to me you had to be “well enough to be unwell” - as in you needed to be on the ball enough and well enough to challenge every aspect of your care.

Heartbreaking and so preventable.

@Madwife123 - That’s awful. Did anyone ever acknowledge that you’d attempted to get help earlier? Even unofficially? Or was it all ignored even more?

Devastating. What I found particularly poignant was reading about the photos the mother took of Martha in hospital in the early days and the photo of her outside the helicopter. The mother was making a record of the accident/hospital stay for the future. In years to come they would look at the photos and say something like, "Remember that time you fell off your bike and had to be airlifted to hospital and we had to cut our holiday short". When she was taking those photos, it never entered her head that Martha wouldn't have a future - that she wouldn't recover from the accident and return to her normal life.

And I agree with all the pps who said that even though the mother was an intelligent and articulate journalist, she was still powerless when dealing with arrogant doctors and consultants who dismissed her as an anxious mother. Also, that her lack of medical knowledge put her at a disadvantage. By her own admission, she didn't realize that junior doctors were only training. Consultants came and went and none of them identified themselves as having overall responsibility (I'm not sure if any of them did?). When Martha's condition became very serious, her parents didn't realize that she should have been moved to intensive care and I'm sure they're now haunted by that realization.

The harrowing article reveals a litany of mistakes and missed opportunities to save Martha, involving multiple medical personnel. The parents asked lots of questions and tried to advocate on their daughter's behalf, but to no avail. If the parents are reading these posts, I would like to express my sincere sympathy on the needless loss of their lovely daughter. It must have been incredibly difficult to write about such a traumatic event and I hope it raises awareness and reminds patients (and their families) that medical staff aren't infallible and can (and should) be questioned and challenged.

Wouldn’t have made a jot of difference to this case. This was a well resourced unit (it’s paediatrics and specialised and the mother says they weren’t busy). The problem with this unit was an awful and dangerous culture.

Sorry can somebody fill me in on what she
meant when she said live on the island?

She's speaking metaphorically. The loss of her daughter means that she feels she's removed from all of the happy, intact families who haven't experienced the loss and trauma that she has endured - and will continue to endure.

Absolutely heartbreaking and devastating. My heart goes out to Martha and her family. Martha should be a beautiful 15 year old growing into a young woman and having a future filled with dreams and aspirations. My DD is the same age. She will turn 15 next Saturday on the 10th September. I gave her a hug after reading Martha's story. Just so desperately sad and should not of happened. The consultant who made the mistakes goes on to be promoted. How did this happened. So a family have lost their world and he gets a promotion!!

I had sepsis in 2010 when I was pregnant with my DS. I had an infection which progressed. It was never treated even when going to the doctor/midwife with my concerns. Ended up in hospital for a long while but the cost of me trusting my GP was my baby died.

Oh I see, thanks

An ‘Everyone’s Invited’ moment, if you like. With everyone encouraged to name hospitals and trusts. I can see Donna Ockenden’s review spreading beyond maternity services to encompass the entirety of healthcare.

@eomeoni

"Just because the mother is a journalist doesn’t mean she can’t share what happens to Martha."

Maybe.

But I would both question both her motivation and her subjective viewpoint.
Sadly there are other service users who have lost loved ones to sepsis - does The Guardian give them a platform ? I think not. Would they get paid for telling their story? Hardly.

This is yet another emotive article from a left-wing paper that continues the relentless bashing of the NHS.

However, any suggesting of people using private healthcare, or raising taxes, or taking responsibility for their own health, to reduce demand on the NHS is met with howls of protest.

Have you not read the article?? She explicitly says it's not bashing the NHS....I am glad she wrote and shared. I hope it makes parents more aware. I am sure other parents have unfortunately been through similar but I am thankful she's in a position to tell her story. She says she hopes it saves lives.

I don’t hold that opinion of The Guardian, if there’s a spectrum of NHS bashing in the press, The Guardian is the least worst of the lot.

Who can blame her mother for using a platform that she has available to her to tell her story. I would do the same were I in the position to put something so powerful out into the public domain.

She prefaces her article with the following; “I am a fierce supporter of the principles of the NHS and realise how many excellent doctors are practising today. There’s no need for the usual political arguments: as the hospital in question has confirmed to me, what happened to Martha had nothing to do with insufficient resources or overstretched doctors and nurses; it had nothing to do with austerity or cuts, or a health service under strain.”

She is not NHS bashing, she is describing her personal lived experience. Martha was failed, but not by austerity or the tories on this occasion. By identifiable culpable individuals who operated in a microcosm of arrogance.

I work in the NHS, I see how broken it is, I sometimes leave work in tears because I’m so frustrated at trying to do the best for patients but the threshold to get more senior clinicians to care about the patients problem being so high. I also see individual clinicians who do not do their best, who believe most patients are fabricating or elaborating their symptoms, clinicians who would see you walk through the door with a limb hanging off and want to challenge you on why you’d not rung 111 or gone to the pharmacy before before darkening their doorway.

Arrogance and bad practice are not mutually exclusive with a broken system, both things can be true at once, and sometimes they both work synergistically to make things even more dangerous for patients. But the overstretched NHS was not the problem for Martha. And your blind faith in the NHS is naive at best.

@justawfultoread
"Have you not read the article??"

Yes, and I notice this emotive strap-line in huge type:

"Our faith in doctors turned out to be fatal"

also

"Yet Dr.Blunder - headstrong with no experience of this kind of situation"

The fact he had no experience of this situation wasn't his fault. To nickname him "Dr Blunder" (a blunder is a "stupid or careless mistake") is unhelpful and derogatory.

"This bleeding is very rare for her injury."

So here, it seems we have a team of people dealing with an unusual presentation of a condition.

I don't have the statistics from UK but even in a country at the forefront of advanced medical practices, the USA, sepsis remains one of the top causes of death and is the number one reason for death amongst non-coronary ICU patients across all U.S. hospitals. But despite its prevalence throughout the healthcare field, an exact definition of what constitutes “sepsis” has been difficult to identify.

So, in order for "Dr Blunder" to gain more experience he would need to see more seriously ill patients. Would the writer wish that on anyone?

@crackedceilinglight The whole experience terrified me. My only experience of hospitals is giving birth and even then no maternity nurse would check me to see if I was giving birth because I was able to talk and apparently not in enough pain even though I felt I was. I gave birth 30 mins later with no pain relief.

Exactly this happened to me. They actually initially sent me home and didn't want to check me because I didn't look like I was in enough pain. I kept getting dismissed. When they finally reluctantly examined me I gave birth 30mins later with no pain relief. I must say though that I am to this day very grateful to the UCLH hospital in London for my healthy daughter regardless of the fact that they kept trying to send me home. This was 12 years ago and I hope that UCLH is still a safe place for patients

‘Question her motivation’ @ITalktotheTrees ?

As a bereaved mother whose daughter was killed by either incompetence or arrogance, you question her motivation for writing this piece?

Are you a robot?

Even the mother with no medical experience kept asking if it was sepsis! The doctors just refused to relay the seriousness of her condition to the PICU despite the fact that she was clearly deteriorating before their eyes.

Honestly, unless you're part of the management at King's, your response to this article is bordering on trolling (at best). It's so unbelievably cruel.

And Dr Blunder haa been promoted a week after Martha's death, so now sees the more serious cases on a regular basis. Very scary.