Neglect by foreign nurse killed Down’s boy wrongly labelled Do Not Resuscitate
A PORTUGUESE agency nurse has been found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence following the death of a disabled boy of six.
Isabel Amaro, 47, who trained in her home country, had ‘very little experience’ of working in the UK and only moved to Britain in 2009 with a qualification in adult care from a Portuguese university.
She had no formal qualifications in looking after children and yet Jack Adcock, a youngster with Down’s Syndrome and a known heart condition, was placed in her care.
When Jack arrived at Leicester Royal Infirmary in February 2011 he was vomiting and had diarrhoea.
Nottingham Crown Court heard Amaro was part of a team which caused Jack to decline to ‘the point of no return’ and that the three women were allegedly neglectful in their duty of care.
Prosecutor Andrew Thomas, QC, Thomas branded Jack’s treatment ‘ truly, exceptionally bad’.
Within less than 11 hours of arriving on the children’s ward, Jack, from Glen Parva, Leicestershire, was struck down by sepsis and went into cardiac arrest. While he rapidly declined in his hospital bed, Amaro kept ‘woefully incomplete’ notes on his condition, Nottingham Crown Court was told.
In the space of more than eight hours, Amaro only wrote down observation notes twice. She also failed to carry out basic tasks such as checking his fluid levels and weighing his nappies to check how serious the diarrhoea was.
At one stage, Jack had soiled eight nappies in the space of an hour but Amaro made no note of this.
In addition, the jury was told, she ‘did not bother’ to verify that the equipment that was keeping him alive was working correctly. As a result of the botched note keeping, Amaro grossly underestimated the desperate state that Jack was in.
When he was admitted, she carried out basic assessments and gave scores for each of his bodily functions. A higher score denotes that the patient is at greater risk.
Mr Thomas said that Amaro had ‘plainly miscalculated’ Jack’s score which led to him not being ‘formally flagged up’ as a ‘high risk patient’.
By the time of his death, Jack was so ill his lips and skin had turned blue. His mother Nicola has told the court that she became hysterical when Jack’s heart began to fail.
The court earlier heard that Jack had temporarily been put under a ‘do not resuscitate’ order after the lead doctor Hadiza Bawa-Garba, 38, mistook him for another patient.
Efforts to save the child’s life were stopped for up to two and a half minutes before the mistake was picked up on by a junior doctor on duty, jurors heard.
Mr Thomas said that the incident illustrated the ‘astonishing degree of the lack of care and attention’ given to Jack in his final hours. The jury returned their verdict on Amaro after three days of deliberations following a four-week trial.
Although Amaro, of Manchester, accepted that she breached her duty of care, she denied the failings significantly contributed to Jack’s death or amounted to gross negligence. Dr Bawa-Garba and Nurse Theresa Taylor, 55, both from Leicester, also face charges of manslaughter by gross negligence.
The jury will continue its deliberations on Bawa-Garba and Taylor today.
‘Astonishing lack of care and attention’