No action against doctors after hospital death of Luton girl

Posted 14/10/2015

A doctors’ watchdog has declared that treatment by three hospital doctors involved in the death of a Luton girl ‘fell seriously below the standard expected’, but has decided to take no action against them.

Instead, the General Medical Council (GMC) has blamed the hospital’s procedures and poor communication for the death.

In November 2013 Claire Allnutt was admitted to the Luton and Dunstable Hospital and diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis.

During January 2014 plans were being made for her to return home.But on 23 January she fell ill with a fever.

She was prescribed antibiotics but they were the same as those prescribed previously.A later investigation by the hospital found that the reason for restarting the same antibiotics was unclear, since a different antibiotic should have been prescribed.

The same investigation revealed that notes made the following day by the microbiologist suggest that the PICC line (a catheter which is inserted to administer antibiotics) was infected and should be removed.But the line remained in place for the following five days.

There was discussion among the doctors about removing the line but nobody took responsibility for doing so.A new electronic patient safety system was also showing Claire was deteriorating, but nobody acted on it.

The next morning Claire fell ill again and the crash team were called.Claire was resuscitated but then stopped breathing. She died the next day from cardiac arrest.

Following the death and an inquest, Claire’s parents Richard and Ann Allnutt instructed a lawyer, medical negligence specialist Carole Watts of Ashtons Legal.

Carole Watts made a freedom of information request to the hospital and wrote a formal letter of complaint to the GMC, naming five doctors involved in the treatment leading up to Claire’s death.One was exonerated by the GMC report, three fell seriously below the standard expected and there is no news as yet of the fifth.

‘We wanted to do everything we could for our daughter,’ Richard Allnutt explains.‘We’re angry at the kind of treatment Claire received and angry at the way both the hospital and the GMC seem to have washed their hands of it.

‘The doctors have got away with the death of our daughter and can just get on with their lives, whereas we can’t.’

Carole Watts points out that Claire died because of a number of errors by both the doctors and the hospital, and claims what happened there is an example of a wider malaise in the NHS.

‘A young girl has died because of a series of incompetent acts and nobody has taken responsibility,’ she claims.

‘The doctors saw a dirty line in Claire’s arm, a line which was slowly poisoning her and would eventually take her life.Yet everybody left it to somebody else to act.So nobody did.

‘The GMC finds excuses to avoid taking action against those doctors concerned.Meanwhile staff didn’t act when the electronic monitoring system showed there was a growing emergency. Again, nobody took responsibility.But then our freedom of information request revealed that they had only had 20 minutes’ training on a system which is supposed to save patients’ lives.

‘Too often hospitals go through the motions of patient safety without taking what are often quite simple solutions to ensure staff communicate properly with each other and know their responsibilities.

‘To give staff only 20 minutes’ training on a hugely expensive electronic patient safety system is absurd and sadly only too typical of NHS thinking.