‘Katy didn’t get the care she deserved’

THE father of a woman who died after she was turned away from Huddersfield Royal Infirmary says he is angry that she did not get the care she deserved.

Katy Thorp, 30, of Lascelles Hall, died at St James’s Hospital in Leeds hours after HRI A&E locum, Dr Boris Zhelcheski, ordered paramedics not to bring her in.

The doctor went out to the ambulance and told the crew to move on, without examining her.

He was criticised by the coroner following an inquest at Wakefield Coroner’s Court but absolved of any blame in her death.

The coroner ruled Miss Thorp’s chronic health conditions, including kidney failure, were too profound for her too survive the infection she had acquired.

He agreed with expert medical opinion that said she would have died anyway, even if she had been treated urgently in Huddersfield.

Speaking after the conclusion of the inquest, Miss Thorp’s father, Simon Thorp, said he felt the delay in her care and the fact that no clinician gave her an emergency steroid injection during the first five hours of her care, as advised by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), had left her to suffer a fatal attack from her Addison’s disease.

The court had heard in the weeks before her death she had suffered six ‘Addisonian crises,’ which caused her to collapse unconscious.

She had been revived each time by giving a large dose of steroids by injection.

But confusion on the night of June 13, 2016, about how much to give her during her care for suspected sepsis meant no clinician administered the emergency injection until 10 minutes before her death.

No post-mortem was done but the official cause of death was given as cardiac arrest caused by community acquired pneumonia.

Coroner Jonathan Leach ruled Miss Thorp, a former King James’s School and Huddersfield Technical College pupil, died from natural causes.

Mr Thorp said: “I did expect natural causes because whether she died from an Addison’s crisis or the infection, it’s natural causes.

“It’s what may or may not have happened up to that, that I am disappointed with, because listening to the evidence, protocols and procedures haven’t been followed in either HRI or at St James’s.”

He added: “I believe she had an Addisonian crisis and that’s why she died.

“It was literally moments before she died when I said to Katy, ‘I’m surprised the injection has not kicked in yet,’ that she said, ‘Oh I haven’t had an injection.’

“That’s when I challenged the doctors and said she needed to have the emergency injection, which I got out, and they were challenging me on why she needed it and where she needed it, and were looking at each other.

“I think if she had been given the steroids earlier she would still be with us.

“I was under the impression she’d been given them on the ambulance.”

Mr Thorp paid tribute to his late daughter, the oldest of his four children.

“She was a