Tamara Mills tragedy:
WHEN Dawn Wilson thinks about the day her 13-year-old daughter died during an asthma attack, she bursts into tears.
Ms Wilson sobs as she remembers Tamara Mills’s last words, “I’m struggling to breathe”, the way she looked when she lost consciousness and the fact she died with only hospital staff around her.
Asthma attacks were nothing new for Tamara. In fact, she had been admitted to hospital almost once a month since the age of seven, when she had swine flu. She had been to see medical professionals 47 times in different parts of the NHS in the four years before she died in April 2015. But on each occasion, medics had failed to connect her health records and notice how frequently she was being treated.
Had the multiple hospitals, out-of-hours services and GP surgery communicated, someone would have noticed Tamara’s health was deteriorating.
“Tamara’s is clearly a case where there was an absolute breakdown between the departments,” says Dawn Bagley, solicitor for the Mills family.
Tamara was a determined, bright teenager who wanted to be an actress. But worsening respiratory problems affected her childhood.
She stopped attending PE lessons and when she went out with friends, there was always risk of an attack.
“I was on standby 24-7,” says Ms Wilson. As her condition worsened, Tamara would wheeze badly and cough.
Following asthma attacks in which her lips went blue and face turned grey, she had to stay at her grandparents’ bungalow because she couldn’t walk up the stairs at the family’s home.
Ms Wilson requested doctors to increase her daughter’s medication and change her care plan, in vain.
Six months before she died, Tamara had a near-fatal asthma attack and ended up in intensive care.
“Tamara and I never thought about death,” says Ms Wilson. “We just looked at it as, you go to the hospital, get steroids, go on a nebuliser, then come home. You don’t expect it to be fatal.”
On April 11 2015, Tamara was at her grandparents’ house when she had difficulty breathing around 2am. Her mother and paramedics were called immediately, but she soon passed out.
Her last conscious act was an attempt to remove her oxygen mask, while panicking and gasping for air.
An inquest in 2015 found the NHS’S failure to coordinate Tamara’s care across its services had contributed to her “premature death”.
“For me, Tamara’s case was more than tragic and a failure,” she says. “It was six years of neglect.”
She is also angry that IT systems are yet to be updated and practices changed. She recently heard it could be five years before there is coordinated care in her area of the NHS.
“How many more deaths are going to take place in that time? It makes me angry, really angry,” says Ms Wilson, also mother to Dominic, 11 – who has asthma himself – and Shaun, 22.