[warning: death, heartbreaking story] This is appalling. How could it have happened?

[TraumaQuestions]

A dying woman called 999 and asked for an ambulance, giving her address. No ambulance was dispatched. Nobody checked up on her. Her profoundly disabled daughter, who depended on her totally, also died. Nobody noticed for weeks or months.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2z36yzzdlo

The weirdos that get their kicks from ringing 999 and wasting emergency services time are partly culpable. Have none of you ever watched the excellent Ambulance programme (on BBC I think.) They deal with call after call of ‘frequent flyers’ some of them obviously with mental heath issues, but a good proportion of them are just malicious. After watching a few episodes of that, I can easily see how a genuine call gets overlooked.
Such a shame there were no neighbours, friends, postman, window cleaner, etc to notice. A sad reflection of the keep to yourself society we’ve created.

Sorry but no.

If pay grade was the problem, this sort of thing would happen all the time.

It doesn't take a genius to communicate effectively.

@Jellycatspyjamas your comment is actually an insult to emergency call handlers. They are, by all accounts, and from what I've seen on documentaries, extremely sensitive and conscientious workers. There will be one or two who are below par as with any profession. These are the ones that need calling out, not blanket protections.

Not everyone does their job because it pays well. Many of us work in the care sector because we want to help people.

Absolutely appalling story. As the sibling of someone with DS I find it particularly unbearable. And yes, you do get the sense that if this had been Lucinda and her daughter Arabella in Hampshire, the authorities might have been a bit less dismissive of their welfare.

The police said there was no crime and the ambulance service said they were sorry their service fell short on this occasion.

Makes it sound something trivial like a pizza delivery didn't turn up.

It's appalling, but not sure how it can be construed as racism, according to some posters? We don't know the full background, were social services involved or mental health services? I think there needs to be an enquiry.

And you’ve entirely missed my point. Yes many, many minimum wage workers are incredibly conscientious and do amazing work. They do that work in systems that are under funded, under resourced and under increasing pressure. That pressure either breaks the person (trying to do excellent work under immense pressure) or breaks the system (no checks and balances, no space to think clearly, no actual resource to provide support to the public). In this case the whole system broke down, in another it’ll be the person. Both have absolutely tragic end results.

I don’t know what happened here, but I do know public services - running with high vacancy rates, no ongoing service provision because they’ve all been cut to the bone, people not training for professions like social work which are essential to prevent tragedy. And then when someone working under that pressure inevitably makes a mistake, and that mistake inevitably costs lives (because that’s the nature of the job) people scream for their head on a spike. Paying no attention at all to the circumstances that leave people working in crisis.

This will keep happening for as long as we under funded essential public services. The names will change, the failing service will change but the outcomes will be equally tragic.

When she went into hospital the first time adult social services should have been involved because her daughter couldn't care for herself alone. The hospital knew she wanted to get home to her daughter. Why didn't they make a referral for safeguarding??
Ultimately it was the call handler who let her die. I hope she isnt in that role anymore because she is not safe to be a 999 call handler.

Nobody wants anyone's head on a spike. We just don't want it glossed over with a 'lessons will be learnt' (which of course they won't!)

If you mess up at work, you usually face some kind of sanction, no matter how much you're paid.

You can't just make a 'mistake' like this and expect it not to be addressed.

Agree the system is broken, but you can't simply fix it by paying everyone high salaries. It's not affordable.

They may well have made a referral for safeguarding. A good friend of mine left social work recently, she worked out that the size of her case load meant she had one hour per week to give each child on her case load. One hour for background assessments, home visits, record keeping, reporting writing, multi agency meetings and any direct work needed. What quality of work do you think she could meaningfully do? She left because she couldn’t practice safely, but that takes another worker out of the system.

The report says a medical advisor made the decision to not respond with an ambulance so not the call handler.

This is so devastatingly sad.

Easy to believe though. I have a disabled child, a while
ago I also had a serious infection when DH was away with work. I had to self discharge from hospital to pick her up (as no one else could) and the staff were not only completely unsympathetic but borderline rude and uncaring - they said if I left I couldn’t come back (even later the same day/the following morning once care sorted) and would need to get my GP to re-refer me.

I was quite surprised there was no duty of care but staff seemed pleased just to have one fewer patient to treat…

And I would happily do so if that were possible, but I can tell you from my own observations of my GP practice that the waiting room is usually empty - GPs may be very busy reading the overlong and tedious online triage forms we are obliged to complete, but they are not actually seeing patients.

The call handler being held accountable won’t stop another tragedy like this occurring.

Until our public services are fixed, we will keep reading about vulnerable adults and children who fell through the cracks and paid the ultimate price.

I am a student social worker having worked in social care for most of my adult life. Nobody goes into these jobs lightly, we know what’s at risk. I know that when I’m juggling a case load of 20 vulnerable children, the wrong decision could be life or death. That thought keeps me awake at night. I know how difficult it is to collaborate with other agencies effectively. I know that my most pressing cases might not be the most pressing to the healthcare professionals or police officers I work with and I might have to wait for a response before I can take my next steps. I know I am not always given the information I need to do my job properly. I know that I can’t force entry to a property, and if I need someone to gain access I need to pray that the police think it’s as urgent as I do.

Look at the social worker who called twice for a welfare check at a property where a man and his son were later found dead. She even crossed a line and obtained keys from the letting agency to get into that property and still people blamed her for not doing enough.

Every single person I work with, in education, health, the police WANT to help vulnerable people. They WANT to do the job well, but we can’t always do so because of the system we’re working in. There are not enough resources to meet the needs of everyone who needs support. There aren’t enough police officers to carry out welfare checks when needed, there aren’t enough GP’s to carry out home visits, there aren’t enough ambulances to send to everyone who needs one, and there aren’t enough social workers to meet the demands of ever increasing caseloads.

I'm sorry, yes there are systemic failings here, but that call handler absolutely shouldn't have spent all that time arsing around asking over and over again what language she spoke and whether she needed an interpreter.
It smacks of "you have a slight accent, I'm British, I don't want you here, I'll pretend I don't understand you" racism that everyone with a slight foreign accent has experienced and knows only too well.
Absolute racism 100% and they'll get away with it, people are already doing backflips to defend them. Yes other services could have saved her, but at the end, that one person's appalling decision making directly led to this.
The responses at the inquest sound like just more NHS buck passing.

Why are we blaming the call handler? The report says they tried to call back, and that it was an emergency medical adviser who closed it all down. It sounds like that is someone other than the call handler.

At EMAS, the call handlers and emergency medical advisor are one and the same.

Not that I’m placing any blame, just clarifying.

This 🥲

I know that there are many sole carers out there, but how can we be happy with a system that lets a seriously ill carer go home to care from hospital ‘pragmatically’ because there is no help?

Ed Davey’s dead right about this, why do we have so many carers and people they care for in such vulnerable situations…

This awful tragedy reminds me of a case in France several years ago where a young woman with a clearly African accent called for an ambulance, was denied, and died a few hours later. In that case the call handlers were recorded openly mocking her and the main one was given a prison sentence.

I agree. I recently watched a documentary about call handlers and was horrified at how (there's no nice way to say this) dim they all were! They're doing such a responsible job, but you just knew they'd left school with barely any qualifications.

Yep. Our GP practice used to have a waiting room that comfortably seated 14 people. It was always full.

They refurbished the practice just after Covid and got rid of the waiting room. Instead there's just a little row of 5 chairs in reception.

I don’t think having better triage, so that the GP waiting room isn’t stuffed full of people infecting each other and waiting hours, is a bad thing. Yes GPs are seeing patients- lots of them. And I don’t understand why this case, where the GP was not involved at all, is suddenly causing GP criticism. If either the ambulance or the hospital had quickly notified the GP of what had happened, they are the one remaining service where it’s just possible there was enough continuity of care for someone to do something. I work in a community team for stroke survivors, and we email and call GP practices about concerning issues including not being able to get hold of people all the time, and the vast majority of the time they respond fast and effectively.

This is truely awful.

We can all take a more active role in looking out for our less able friends and family, and those people who fall outside of our normal group. EG: The lady up the road we see and wave at sometimes - when did we last see her - who can we ask if she's Ok?

What can we all do today?

It isn’t that exactly the problem @mumda most carers are doing care jobs that are so hard, we could ask her if she’s ok, but are we going to pop in for four hours so she can go and rest and look after the person she’s caring for?

most of us feel we don’t have that kind of time.

Yep. Our GP practice used to have a waiting room that comfortably seated 14 people. It was always full.

They refurbished the practice just after Covid and got rid of the waiting room. Instead there's just a little row of 5 chairs in reception.