How could that possibly have happened in 21st century England?

[Gorionine]

Does anyone remember that awful story?

happened in 2005

It was on the news yesterday because of ongoing inquest.

yes it's terrible. I do not want to apportion blame but I would have definitely taken my child straight back to the hospital after just one day of refusing to eat and drink

Awful story.

I mean I would have ignored what the parents say they were told and just taken her to A & E

I feel like you Dropdeadfred, I was struggling to find an OP that did not say exactly what your second post said.

Actually I can believe it.

The parents shouldn't have listend to the advice of the profesionals.

Not everyone has the confidence to stand up to the 'experts' though, sadly.

|I cannot believe anyone could be so blindly deferential to professional opinion that they allowed their child to starve to death. Nurse won't listen? Speak to another one. Hospital won't admit her? Take her to another one.

It actually makes me really angry.

It is hard though sometime to "not listen" as you are often looked upon as if you are the one totally out of order, crazed overprotective parent. I think the professional are actally to blame for not talking the parents seriously enough.

I had to stand up to professsionals and know how hard it is when my 10 day old baby developed meningococcal meningitis . Said profesinoal who is a top pead at private hospital with harley st practice and top nhs hopsital diagnosed nothing and sent us home. Two subseq trips to A and E resulted in rebutal. Even dh didn't support me. Finally I rang the same private hospital where he was born and said that i would camp on their door step and call newspapers if they didn't bring him in and test him. they agreed and we saw a different , v junior doc who looked straight out of med school. In under 5 mins he told me he suspected meningitis and in 10 mins was doing lumber puncture. 20 mnins after admission ds was on intravenous antibiotics and on way in ambulance to St Marys.

i learnetd a very valuable lesson that day - do not trust the professinals where your instinct says otheriwse. You may be wrong, yes, but that is your luxury. if the profes are wrong you do not have the luxury of looking red faced and scuttling out.

The professionals are to blame, of course they are, but surely the parents could see that she was dying!

georgimama - I also thought that but presumably she had been declining to that extent gradually and the parents wouldn't know when she had tipped over to the dangerous so to speak.

Going back to my experience , when we got ds in and I asked how long we would have had if he had not been admitted and treated we were told " just hours"

Your situation is a bit different though, developing in 10 days max. This girl hadn't eaten or drunk for 23 days when she died. You don't need to be a paediatrician to work out that if a child doesn't eat or drink for 23 days, they are going to die.

Maybe they thought parents were exaggerating perhaps? it is v unusual for child not to eat or drink anything at all.

not direct compairson but just bringing that experience to the threada to show how professionals can ignore seemingly obvious and life threatening symptoms and how persistent parents really need to be.

That is very true lisalisa we, as parents have to trust our instincts but I think , in the light of this and other experienvces like yours, (I had a similar one with DD4 and bad case of food poisonning), it should be compulsary for the preofessionals to receive training into listening openly to the parents concerns and consider them as a valuable, often reliable source of information regarding their own dcs health.

I cannot say I once went to my GP not having to "fight my corner",wether it was for me or members of the family. Clearly, there is something laking in the training, and that is empathy, open mindness and general "people skills".

Agree with lisalisa. It can be incredibly hard to stand up to professionals. I have an Oxbridge degree and a PhD in a science subject -so I have credentials of the sort that doctors like and yet I have found it very difficult in the past to stand up to doctors. I still find it hard now (have to do it fairly regularly), although I have found ways of dealing with them now that mean I am taken seriously. But I still don't find it easy.

If you read between the lines the parents were phoning their point of contact several times a day. This person had them down as nutters presumably and refused to see the child. They started to take her to hospital and were told not to bring her in. Of course they should have but they were probably hanging on for the appointment they had booked the week after thinking it would be sorted then without having to try and get someone new to the case to listen.

Unfortunate that they didn't have a GP or someone they could go to (am assuming if they'd had a decent relationship with their GP they would have gone).

In the early days of dealing with professionals I had a few comments about being an over anxious first time mother. Even a few that hinted at MSBP. In fact I was absolutely right and my son's condition is at the severe end of the condition he has. The medical profession took over 18 months to diagnose him from my first suspicions. Luckily he had 18 months and his case was never a clinical emergency.

Gorionine - when ds1 and I were in St Marys said pead came to see us and said " I'm truly sorry - I forgot the first rule of peadeatrics and that is to listen to the insitint of the mother". So I htink they are given that training but perhaps don't accord it enough understanding. Or perhaps are guilty of the mindset of many of us in that once we make our mind up about something we aint' gonna change it easily etc.

I do think this empathy and listening is also taught generally to GPs - when I saw my GP yesterday about a suspected lump the first thing she wanted to disucss was my feelings and whether I was scared/how I viewed it etc. That's why its doubly important I think to stand your ground as the professionals can seem to be competent and have your interests/concnerens on board but then diagnose wroongly or badly and we are then taken in....

Agree v strongly with mrsturnip - in my case it wasn't over anxious mother but "worried jewish mother " levelled at me. In case this sounds suspect it wasn't - the pead was jewish and very homely type and just identified with us as worried paretns - the jewish stereotype is well entrenched I'm afraid of mother worrying over everything and I'm afraid that peaad had us firmly in that box and even managed to raise a laugh from dh about it as i am known to be a "concerned mother".

I had only read it today, and it made me very sad. There is no way i could let someone be so careless with my childs health. If i was unhappy, i would have made one hell of a fuss. It is our jobs as parents to look after our children, and i totally agree with lisalisa that if there turns out to be nothing wrong, is being seen as a neurotic parent really so bad when your child's life may be at stake?
I also cannot see how a health professional can afford to be so unbothered when something like this can happen and ruin their career. They know what the newspapers will do!

If you were sure the doctors were neglectng your child you'd do whatever it took to get help. IRL it rarely works like that. The doctor tells you you're overeacting and he will come see the child tomorrow/next week and you think they know what they are talking about.

A long time ago I made a huge fuss and forced doctors to examine my screaming child after I was told "bring her in monday" and then it turned out to be trivial after all.

I'm really not the kind to overeact normally. I belong to the 'leave it alone and it will get better' club, but I was sure that time it was serious.

I'd do it again if I was that worried, but it is hard for parents to judge.

As for the hospitals side in this. Personally I avoid hospitals/doctors as much as possible, but over the years I've had to go see many different doctors with relatives. I don't suppose the NHS is completely staffed by incompetents. I'm sure that it was just a fluke that those were the only kind I ever encountered.

I agree with everything you say onagar, but if you knew your child hadn't eaten or drunk for 23 days, you would know your child was being neglected.

I cannot imagine circumstances in which I would allow medical 'reassurance' to over-ride my knowledge that my child had not eaten or drunk anything.

Would you be allowed to take your child to A&E for loss of weight through not eating? I have always been met with "over anxious mum" if I ever take dd to the docs though!

I am horrified that the poor girl had all her milk teeth extracted and spent the last days, no weeks of her life in agony. Why on earth did they take a 8yo milk teeth out?

The poor parents too. It is easy to read that story and say, "I would have taken my child to A&E". I am sure that her parents deeply regret the trust that they put in the medical establishment. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I found this story so sad.

I've also had to convince doctors that DD was ill, and I don't really care if they label me Munchusen by Proxy.

I called the GP in the morning and said DD needed to be seen. He said it could wait until the next day. I didn't think so, so insisted that she was seen. The GP examined her and called an ambulance to the surgery and went straight to Children's Hospital.

What I find so sad is that the parents trusted the medical assessment.

There's no "allowed" about it Paws! Child is ill, you know they haven't eaten for weeks, they need medical attention.

Yours is the exact attitude I don't understand!

I don't mean allowed, I mean wouldn't they just send you back home again? Came out wrong, sorry!