Optician on death charge after ‘failing to spot boy’s eye swelling’
A BOY of eight died from a buildup of fluid in his brain after a high street optician failed to spot ‘obvious abnormalities’ in both his eyes, a court heard yesterday.
Vincent Barker, known as Vinnie, was told he needed ‘no treatment whatsoever’ after a routine examination with Honey Rose, a locum at a Boots store.
Five months later he collapsed at home before dying in hospital. A jury heard Rose, 35, missed a swelling of the optic disc, or bilateral papilloedema, at the back of his eye.
She is accused of manslaughter by gross negligence in what is understood to be the first case of its kind. Jonathan Rees, QC, prosecuting, said the condition, affecting a raised section of the retina where the optic nerve enters, should have been spotted and Vinnie’s death would have been preventable if he had been sent to a specialist.
‘This conduct was so bad, it fell so far below the expected standard of a competent optometrist, that it was criminal,’ he told Ipswich Crown Court. ‘Had he been urgently referred for further investigation, then the evidence establishes that his hydrocephalus would have been identified and successfully treated.
‘This procedure would have prevented him from dying. Put another way, the defendant’s failure to detect the swelling of Vinnie’s optic discs was a significant contributory factor to his premature death.’
Vinnie, who didn’t wear glasses, visited the Boots store in Ipswich with his mother Joanne Barker, 37, and sister Amber, four, in February 2012 where he was seen by Rose.
Mr Rees told the jury that photos taken during the examination had been compared with one from a year earlier by a consultant paediatric ophthalmologist.
‘Dr Vasileios Kostakis noted that the two images taken during the 2011 examination would seem normal and not raise any cause of immediate concern,’ he said.
‘However, the two images taken during the examination on February 15, 2012, were remarkably different. In his opinion, the second set of images were clearly abnormal and would give rise to the need for immediate intervention and urgent referral to hospital.’
Mrs Barker told the court the children were offered free retinal photographs. ‘It was something fun for the kids to do while they had their eyes tested.’ Mrs Barker recalled Rose checking Vinnie’s eyes with a piece of hand-held equipment with a light on the end and said he behaved ‘perfectly’, giving no indication he was uncomfortable with the light.
The court also heard Helen Fernandes, the lead paediatric neurosurgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, had said in a report that Vinnie’s death was treatable.
Vinnie suffered headaches on a family holiday to Menorca in May 2012. Early on the day he died, he went into his parents’ bedroom at their detached Ipswich house and again complained of a headache. He went back to bed after his father, Ian Barker, 49, gave him Calpol.
His mother collected him in the afternoon when the school called to say he was sick. By 8pm he was ‘cold to the touch’. His parents called 999 and paramedics tried to resuscitate him. At Ipswich Hospital doctors fought to save him for 40 minutes before he was pronounced dead.
Rose, from India, qualified there in 2005 before registering with the General Optical Council in 2010 having passed exams to practise in Britain.
In a police interview, Rose, of Newham, East London, claimed the photos from the examination were taken by a colleague and were not the ones she had been shown as they displayed a ‘completely pathological problem’ which would have led her to make an emergency referral.
The prosecution deny this, along with her claim that Vinnie was photophobic, or sensitive to the light, making it hard to check his eyes with an opthalmascope.
She denies the charge. The case continues.