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

I take part in training junior doctors at my doctors surgery - it specifically relates to my own chronic and rare conditions but I always try to encourage them to see us patients as people, not just numbers. I think the NHS becomes like a conveyor belt for too many working within it.

I dont think the two things are comparable at all.

No, absolutely. I wouldn’t want or expect patients to be grateful. It should be the norm. I really don’t know why it isn’t and it worries me a lot.

Both myself and my Dd have ongoing chronic health conditions and we have been /are on the receiving end of some shit care. 🤷‍♀️ Maybe staff are burnt out, short staffed, over worked, complacent.

I wonder if the consultants she refers to will read this article.

I think a pp comment about hierarchy and egos is very valid actually.

there’s a heartbreaking video which I always show to students about a woman who died during a routine operation. Two or three experienced doctors battled to get an airway into this woman and failed, all the time they were so task focused they didn’t think about the bigger picture......that she needed a tracheotomy, it was a clear case of can’t intubate. The nurses got the trachy kit ready but were too nervous to say to the doctors that the woman needed a trachy. So she died due to lack of oxygen. While the nurses watched wondering why the doctors weren’t doing a trachy.

Me too. Poor child must have suffered so much.

I watched Bodies on Netflix the other week and thought, bet there’s an element of truth to this. The covering up- goes on everywhere to a degree but some mistakes can’t be solved with a ‘sorry’ and they can’t be corrected.

So so sad I'm in tears reading this.

Absolutely horrific and heartbreaking.

If they do, they won't feel guilty.
They'll feel outraged that the plebs have dared to criticise.

The PR team will show them.

my cousin had a minor surgery recently, or tried to. She had a local anaesthetic and they couldn't do the procedure, but kept trying, she had to tell them to stop after two hours. They just saw a piece of meat on the table.

@QuebecBagnet Elaine Bromily. Yes I show that too.

This was an awful case. But massive bandwagon jumping damming our nhs. For every tragedy like this there’s 100000000s of people who would otherwise be dead.

I am confident that's a massive overestimate!

Yes. This has been exactly my experience when I’ve made formal complaints about treatment.

They all stick together. They all back each other up. People who complain are treated as sheer annoyances.

My daughter died on a Bank Holiday. There was no paed consultant on call that night. He had to be called in from home.

I actually think for every story like this in the media there are a significant number of others which aren’t in the media, a high proportion of those the families won’t have realised mistakes were made.

A friend of mine her dad dropped dead in his sitting room one day, was in his 70s so you think fair enough. However he’d been to his GP that morning with every symptom of an aortic aneurism and was told he had heartburn. His family just think it’s one of those things. No post mortem, the coroner never picked up an issue. Maybe I’m expecting too much.

Heartbreaking - every parent should read the sepsis guidelines weekly until they can parrot them. Most common cause of death in this country.

Parents should never, ever implicitly trust a healthcare professional in an acute situation. Fight against every instinct to be lulled into the security a hospital bed can provide. Question everything, read obs results and check against sepsis guidelines, escalate if you’re not being taken seriously (matron, consultant, site manager).

@Afterfire I had a situation similar to this with my daughter, who has a rare adrenal disease similar to Addisons: when she was a baby we presented at the hospital with her in crisis but they refused to administer her cortisone injection as it "wasn't process" despite me having reams of instructional paperwork. I ended up having to sign a document saying I'd refused their advice and injecting her myself in the middle of A&E. She was well within minutes as I knew she would be - I was furious.

Absolutely okay. And put aside meek people pleasing deferential female socialisation too. I met a woman with a lovely newborn. First baby. She felt something was wrong as movements changed and demanded a scan. Fobbed off. She was a bolshy type and insisted despite 🙄 and comments from staff. Went back and insisted on the scan given reluctantly. Cord round baby’s neck emergency c section within the hour. If she hadn’t done that he would have died.

Oh totally
I had a thread about mum being in A&E overnight for 16 hours after a suspected heart attack.

The written report that followed could honestly have belonged to another patient. Maybe it did? We flagged it up, got several calls from other depts who were expecting to see her because she'd been referred for a bunch of conditions she doesn't have.

I now think it wasn't a mix up. It was a deliberate cover up so they didn't get in trouble for leaving a suspected heart attack patient alone for so long.

In previous years, mum has been in hospital and told she must take a medication that she is allergic to. Dad and I had to battle to stop it, taking it in turns literally standing guard at her bed while the other one ran around the hospital trying to get it corrected.

A friend was very ill a few years ago because in spite of a bracelet warning she's allergic to penicillin - essential to know as she has a chronic health issue - she was given it after hospital admission. Took weeks to recover. It would have been all over her records too.

Sorry, the "totally" was for Quebec saying there's a lot we don't hear about.

I’m so sorry to hear of your experience.

It just really isn’t good enough. At all.

What I find scary is how educated and articulate Martha's parents are and yet still they couldn't get drs to listen to them. There seems to be a culture of arrogance and fear with more junior NHS staff not feeling they can speak up and more senior drs just not listening to anyone. surely as a professional you want lots of info to make informed decisions. Parents know their children the best so if they are concerned and giving you info, they shouldn't be ignored.

I don't know how you can represent yourself if you're ill yourself or if you're not 'articulate' - seems like you won't have a chance in hell.

Just devastating and such a wonderful girl...

You know they pay for insurance for defence lawyers if things go wrong? I was told Obs and Gyn can pay up to £100,000 a year for insurance in case of being sued (don’t know how accurate that is). I was vicariously aware of an instance where a Dr was found to have caused a preventable death in an inquest in a private hospital- she wasn’t struck off. I don’t see that there is much of a difference in accountability.