A blunder beyond belief
Nurses ‘find no sign of life’ in patient – and inform her devastated partner He returns to hold her hand and say goodbye. . . only to find she’s still alive
THE family of a cancer patient was told in a phone call by hospital staff she had died suddenly – only to discover she was still alive after rushing to her bedside.
Astonishingly, Ann Saville’s partner realised she was still breathing when he held her hand to say a final goodbye.
‘She was still warm and I could feel she was pulsing,’ said John Harrison. ‘I said to the nurses: “She’s still alive!” and they said: “She’s not, it’s this involuntary reaction”.’
After eventually realising their mistake, nurses summoned a doctor but Mr Harrison claims they waited more than an hour for her to arrive.
In a further twist, it is now feared leukaemia patient Ms Saville, 71, may have suffered brain damage during the episode. Last night, she remained critically ill.
‘I cannot believe the course of events,’ said Mr Harrison, a photographer. ‘They’re professionals – they’re supposed to know what they’re doing.’
The blunder at St James’s Hospital, Leeds, is the latest in a series of scandals to hit the NHS in recent months. In November, The Mail on Sunday unearthed a catalogue of hospital mortuary mix-ups in which dead bodies were abandoned for days.
Ms Saville, from Pudsey, Leeds,
‘I knew straight away she was still alive’
was diagnosed with leukaemia in December and initially had a tenday course of chemotherapy.
On February 21, she rang Mr Harrison, her partner of more than 30 years, to say doctors had told her she would be home in five days.
‘She was doing brilliantly and there were no problems,’ he said. But at 5.30 the following morning, he was called by a nurse.
‘She said Ann had been found slumped over the bed. She said she was not breathing, there was no pulse, and there were no signs of life. That’s what the nurse said – verbatim. Then she said, “Don’t jump in your car and rush down here, because there’s nothing we can do.”’
He was told a resuscitation team had worked on Ms Saville for half an hour before stopping.
After putting the phone down, Mr Harrison called Ann’s family to break the news, including her brother Philip.
Philip Plant, 64, added: ‘I phoned the hospital and asked if it was OK to come up. But the nurse said: “I’m sorry love, she just passed away a few minutes ago.”
John Harrison says when he arrived at the hospital: ‘I told the nurses, “I want to say goodbye to her.” The nurses showed me in and said, “Ignore the fact she looks as if she is breathing, it’s an involuntary reaction. She is dead; there’s nothing we can do.”
‘I got hold of her hand and I knew straight away that she was still alive.’
When Mr Harrison swore at the nurses, saying it was clear she was alive, he was told he was being ‘emo- tional’. But he responded: ‘She is still alive. I want you to do something, and I want you to do it now!’ Finally, a nurse checked and found a pulse.
Mr Harrison claimed: ‘Then they tried to tell me she was dead and she had come back to life. But I’m absolutely positive that they were wrong, and that she was alive all along.’
He continued: ‘She did not look dead at all to me. She looked like she was suffering. Her breath was staccato, she wasn’t breathing easily, she was laid out on her back gasping for life. If I had not been there, I am sure she would have died.
‘I told one of the doctors: “You were going to take her down to the morgue and put her in the fridge, weren’t you?”’
Mr Harrison claimed from the time he told nurses she was still alive, at about 6.30am, it took an hour for them to summon a registrar. ‘She confirmed Ann was still alive,’ he said.
Mr Harrison said he had ‘no idea why it took so long’ to raise a doctor, adding: ‘Nobody’s telling me anything. They keep saying: “We are really sorry that this has happened.” But nobody will actually say why it happened, or even what happened.’
Mr Harrison, 58, said he wanted an external investigation as he did not trust the hospital to launch its own inquiry.
Ms Saville, who has two teenaged grandchildren, is currently unresponsive, said her partner, but her eyes are open.
‘She has no reaction when people walk into the room,’ he said.
‘The nurses said I was being emotional’
After the incident, doctors told him they did not believe she would last more than 72 hours – but that was two weeks ago.
Mr Harrison said he was told the resuscitation team had worked on her for about half an hour prior to the nurse calling him. ‘They said her brain was starved of oxygen for so long, that she would be brain damaged.’
He thought the staff’s belief she was dead may have meant she suffered additional brain damage – a claim the hospital trust declined to comment on last night.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust said it was investigating. Dr David Jackson, clinical director, said: ‘We acknowledge this is a very troubling time for Ms Saville’s family and can fully understand why they are finding it difficult to deal with this tragic turn of events.
‘Our clinical team, including our matron and consultants, are reviewing Ms Saville and meeting with the family on a regular basis. This is a very complex and unusual circumstance and we have set up an investigation to look at the detail of the situation.
‘In the meantime we will continue to do our best to support the family and to provide answers as and when they become available.’