Sepsis kills father after nurse said he had chest infection
A FATHER died from sepsis just ten hours after he was diagnosed with a chest infection and sent home with a prescription for antibiotics, an inquest heard.
Paul Hardy, 35, visited his GP surgery twice in four days after suffering from a chesty cough, vomiting and diarrhoea.
He also had a fluctuating temperature and on the first occasion he was told by a nurse he had flu. After his symptoms became worse, he went back and a different nurse diagnosed a chest infection, referred him for a chest X-ray at a walk-in centre and gave him a prescription for antibiotics.
But later that evening he was found unresponsive by his wife Rachel, who had just taken their eight-year- old daughter Gabriella to bed. She called an ambulance and started trying to revive her husband but he was pronounced dead by paramedics after they arrived at the family home in Biddulph, Staffordshire.
A post-mortem examination revealed he had an abscess on his lung, which had partly collapsed, North Staffordshire Coroner’s Court was told. The cause of death was given as sepsis due to streptococcus pneumonia with abscess formation.
Sepsis, known as the ‘silent killer’, develops when an infection sparks a violent immune response in which the body attacks its own organs. It is the leading cause of avoidable deaths in the UK, killing at least 44,000 people a year.
Coroner Ian Smith said he believed the sepsis and collapsed lung developed in the hours after Mr Hardy’s second visit to Biddulph Doctors at the town’s Primary Care Centre in February last year. All front-line surgery staff have received sepsis training since Mr Hardy died.
Mrs Hardy told the inquest her husband, who was asthmatic, did not go immediately for the chest X-ray as the nurse had told them to wait until his temperature had gone down. The nurse claimed he did not show sepsis symp-