Allergy hell after hospital blunders
WHeN Leah Watts was taken to hospital with an allergic reaction, she thought she would be in good hands.
Instead, she had two more life-threatening reactions because of incompetent staff – and despite handing out copies of a list of allergens she must avoid.
Both were caused by e-numbers, one that was in a pudding, the other in a drug.
There were dangerous delays treating both episodes because staff were either not qualified or not permitted to use an epiPen, an injection device that can halt allergic reactions.
‘It’s a hospital – it’s supposed to be somewhere you feel safe,’ she said.
Miss Watts, 28, was taken to Queen’s Hospital in Romford, essex, when something she ate at the nursery where she works triggered a reaction. Despite struggling to breathe and vomiting, she handed over a list of allergens she always carries, which includes gluten, dairy, enumbers and nine types of medication.
In the early hours, she needed more medication after a relapse and the doctor was unable to find her allergens list, so she gave him another. A third was handed over later the same day as, again, the list went missing. After two days she was told she would be discharged after lunch. Miss Watts, of Doddinghurst, essex, asked staff if the ham salad and pot of fruit with syrup was safe and told that it was.
But after eating a little of it ‘my tongue had pins and needles’, she said. It was 45 minutes before a doctor arrived, by which time the oxygen levels in her blood had fallen by a quarter as she fought to breathe. A nurse ‘didn’t know how to administer an epiPen’.
‘I thought I was going to die,’ she said. After two more days on a saline drip, on November 16 a nurse arrived with the allergy tablet piriton, plus steroids and the laxative lactulose.
Miss Watts asked the nurse to check for enumbers and was told the drugs were fine.
But 15 minutes later her lips began to swell and the rash came back. Again a nurse refused to use the epiPen. The ward matron gave it to Miss Watts to inject, saying she wasn’t allowed to do it. Miss Watts went home the next day.
Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS Trust said it was ‘extremely sorry and disappointed’ to hear of Miss Watts’s experience.
‘Hospital is supposed to be somewhere you feel safe’