Anorexic woman let down by NHS hospitals – coroner

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A CORONER has criticised health professionals for failing to give a young woman who died after suffering severe anorexia the care she needed.

Maria Jakes, 24, died of multiple organ failure in September 2018 after years of struggle with the eating disorder. Coroner Sean Horstead last week concluded that the agencies involved in the Peterborough waitress’s care missed several opportunities to monitor her illness properly.

Mr Horstead said that there had been insufficient record-keeping and a failure to notify eating disorder specialists in the weeks before her death, following treatment at Addenbrooke’s and Peterborough City Hospital.

He also criticised the lack of specialist eating disorder dietitians at the hospitals, “together with a nursing team insufficiently trained and knowledgeable of eating disorder patients”, which contributed to the lack of monitoring.

Despite the criticism, the father of another anorexia victim, whose death was described in a Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s report as an “avoidable tragedy”, has said the inquest failed to properly address challenge Maria’s “lack of care”.

Nic Hart, whose 19-year-old daughter Averil died in 2012, criticised the inquest as “a very one-sided process”.

He said: “No real challengers were made of the clinical evidence or the lack of care.” Mr Hart said the inquest failed to challenge the NHS trusts involved in her care over an overdose she took while sectioned under the Mental Health Act and did not question rigorously enough the lack of monitoring.

Maria and Averil were two of five young women with eating disorders whose deaths between 2012 and 2018 are being examined by Mr Horstead, who said he has so far made “no finding, conclusion or determination as to whether there is a definitive link.”

Abigail Baker, a friend of Maria who gave evidence, said health professionals had failed to address the “severe trauma” Maria had suffered as a child. “When professionals became aware that Maria had been subjected to sexual violence this should have been a paramount moment of intervention,’’ she said. Addenbrooke’s and Peterborough City Hospital did not respond to requests for comment. or