A grieving mother has told an inquest how secretive, evasive and ‘patronising’ behavior by NHS staff was ‘traumatic’ and led to her spending years searching for the truth about her daughter’s death.
Jedidajah Otte told how she faced a “stubborn refusal” from doctors and nurses at St Thomas’ Hospital in London to tell her what was wrong with three-month-old Aviva’s health.
The hospital has maintained for ten years that Aviva died of natural causes. However, last month it admitted that her death occurred in January 2014 due to contaminated food given to her by staff, which caused her to develop a fatal infection.
Otte, a journalist for the Guardian, also accused Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust (GSTT), which runs the hospital, of “dishonesty”, a “lack of transparency” and “misleading” her about the outbreak of the disease . Bacillus cereusa foodborne bacteria in baby food, which caused Aviva’s death.
Otte also claimed that she was “repeatedly kept in the dark” about why her daughter’s health suddenly collapsed, was “discouraged” from making inquiries and was “spoken out” for looking at Aviva’s medical notes in her desire to understand her condition.
GSTT has denied being “unfair” to Otte. Two senior doctors from St Thomas’ who treated Aviva told the inquest there was no “cover-up” over the reasons she lost her life.
However, one of the doctors, neonatologist Dr Grenville Fox, who treated Aviva until shortly before her death, told the court on September 10 that the intravenous parenteral nutrition she had received – which GSTT had prepared – had caused or contributed to her death contributed, despite the trust denying this for ten years.
Otte made her allegations in three written statements she submitted to the inquest, at the Southwark coroner in London. It is investigating the deaths of three vulnerable premature babies who died in two separate outbreaks of contaminated feed. They were Aviva, and in June 2014 Yousef Al-Kharboush, also at St Thomas’, and Oscar Barker at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.
Otte wrote: “Just as I felt strongly then (in 2014), I continue to feel strongly now that Aviva’s father and I were repeatedly kept in the dark about Aviva’s condition, the circumstances of her sudden decline and death. GSTT staff repeatedly discouraged us from investigating further and I was told several times that I had dared to read Aviva’s medical notes.” Aviva was one of the twin girls Otte gave birth to in October 2013.
“Patronizing phrases like, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, the baby is sick, but we’re dealing with it’ were part of the daily updates and discussions that took place with doctors and nurses… It was mainly these continued attempts by staff to keep us as parents only vaguely informed, making the events we experienced in this (neonatal) unit as traumatic as I will always remember them.”
Otte added: “It was this stubborn refusal by the medical teams treating both my daughters to accurately and transparently describe their concerns, diagnoses and treatments that, in the aftermath of Aviva’s death, gave rise to many years of anguished, futile attempts from me and my mother. to summarize what had happened and how my daughter’s death could have been avoided.”
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She, her daughters’ father and her own parents “were never convinced that her sudden, extremely traumatic death was ‘natural’ and merely a consequence of her premature birth, low birth weight, previous brain injury and abdominal surgery, as stated on the website. death certificate,” said Otte.
It’s also “truly astonishing” that neither Bacillus cereus nor sepsis – the condition it led to and which helped cause Aviva’s death – were listed as the cause of death on her death certificate and it was “absurd” that her newborn discharge summary did not refer to the sepsis, also known as blood poisoning, she added.
In a statement to the inquest, responding to Otte’s claims, Fox denied her allegation of “a wider dishonesty at GSTT in relation to the Bacillus cereus outbreak.”
He said: “I take the suggestion that I or my GSTT colleagues have been dishonest very seriously indeed, and for the record I do not agree with this suggestion.”
The staff did not know that Aviva was infected Bacillus cereus when she died on Jan. 2, 2014, so she didn’t put it on her death certificate because a blood test from the day before hadn’t been analyzed, he said.
However, his colleague Dr William Newsholme, GSTT’s head of infectious diseases, told the inquest in a statement that confirmation from the test that Aviva did indeed have bacteria in her system had come just hours before her death.
The investigation has now been completed. Dr. Julian Morris, the senior coroner presiding, will announce his conclusions at a further hearing on October 23.