Boy, 4, died of sepsis after ‘being told by doctors to take Calpol’

28 comments

1. Sepsis is no joke. Every hour is vital when you have it.

   The news story doesn’t explain how the poor boy caught it, as that would explain how it was missed

2. My daughter had sepsis. The GP told me, as her mother, that she was fine, and that her toe was hurting because I had been cutting her toenails incorrectly (I hadn’t, she was completely incorrect) and that was why she wasn’t well. My husband spoke to them less than 30 minutes later and suddenly they called an ambulance and she was taken to hospital urgently.

   Yet again, we’re seeing another case of a child dying because the doctors ignored the parents. More often than not, those parents are a part of a demographic that is ignored – whether it’s the believe that foreigners are scamming the NHS, or that mothers are hysterical, or that ethnic minorities are ignorant, medical professionals in this country appear to have very dangerous and engrained (utterly incorrect) biases that prevent them providing safe and appropriate care.

3. Advise people to read the article. The inquest has started but has not been resolved. Medical negligence has not yet been established but that doesn’t stop our lovely media from happily taking the opportunity to smear our hardworking emergency medicine doctors (who have to make literally hundreds of near-impossible decisions every day about who is most/likely likely to die if they get sent home).

   The vast majority of the time, discharge home with antipyretic drugs to manage a fever is going to be the appropriate treatment for the vast majority that doctors recommend this to. There simply is not enough capacity in the hospital for every single person with a fever to be admitted to see if it turns into sepsis. We need about a hundred times more hospitals and bed capacity for this to be even a remote possibility one day. Until then, some people sadly will go home and deteriorate and all we can do is try to manage that risk with safety netting advice.

   Edit: I would also like to add that sepsis is not an infection. You cannot “catch” sepsis and there is no specific clinical test for it. Sepsis is “a life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection” – ie. it is when your immune system overreacts to the presence of an infection and it starts to affect organ function. Any minor infection could potentially progress into sepsis, this does not mean that every infection will.

   Once again, there is no specific “sepsis test” that the doctors failed to perform. Sepsis is diagnosed [when a cluster of symptoms and physiological parameters are observed to coexist and the patient is very systemically unwell](https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng51/chapter/Under-16s-evaluating-risk-and-managing-suspected-sepsis). You can see the criteria for the level of risk that a child under 5 would be judged against in that link. Having a fever and being off food is not enough of an indicator in isolation. If he did not trigger as being high or even medium risk at the time of his attendance then there would be no way to know that things would progress the way they unfortunately did.

4. When my sone was 3 he became very ill we took him to the Dr they said give Calpol he will get fine. We took home to A&E they gave him pain killers said he would be fine and we were sent home, he got worse, went to A&E again, gave painkillers sent home he got worse, went to A&E again same story, he went limp, collapsed, ww called an ambulance he was kept in hospital for more than 2 weeks. Found to have a rare immune issue that needed treatment, nearly died. I don’t trust Dr’s now. Noone bothered to do any tests till he collapsed.

5. My daughter had sepsis and, thankfully, our GP had recently done a course in it. He sent us to the hospital, offered to phone an ambulance and was on the phone to the Paediatric A&E before we had left the building.

   Its no exaggeration to say he saved her life that day, may him and his descendants ever prosper.

   Then you start googling and realise how easily things could have gone sideways and start freaking out.

6. I know it’s not their fault, I know that they’re understaffed, overworked, and that there are a lot of people who genuinely waste doctors’ time with little things that aren’t concerning in the slightest. But that doesn’t mean they should brush off everyone. It doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t take you seriously if you know something is wrong.

   My dad has a chronic illness and is basically bedridden. For the past few months we’ve had so many issues but the doctor just wouldn’t come out to see him (or were impossible to get ahold of to begin with) and he’s already been to the hospital once with a similar issue so it just felt like we had to monitor everything ourselves and try and deal with it alone. We live with him every single day and can tell when something is seriously off; he has lost so much weight its scary, he wasn’t eating more than 2 bites a day, barely drinking water, getting extreme hot and cold sweats, his speech was slurred and inaudible, he was sleeping and inattentive nearly the entire day and so much more. And it would happen in episodes where one hour he seems somewhat fine and the next, everything is up in the air. The doctor came out once, but it just so happened to be when he was doing somewhat okay, so she just prescribed antibiotics and went about her day. They didn’t work so we called her again. She suggested a stronger dose an monitoring before maybe calling the hospital; I pushed and pushed, describing everything that happens, showing her the log we’ve been keeping of his health and explaining that we can tell something is seriously wrong. So she finally agreed and we took him to the hospital. We were right. There were a few things that were wrong, and it wasn’t just a minor infection.

   We’re still dealing with it and happy he’s finally being seen, but it really should not have to take so long for doctors to act and to take their patients seriously, especially when the patient is already vulnerable.

   Whether it’s crime, poverty, or health, this country has ‘deal with the consequences’ approach rather then ‘prevent it in the first place’ and yes, it will be expensive and time consuming to change how things work but prevention would save so much more money in the long run and everyone would be much better off.

7. I’m willing to bet this involved multiple non-Dr reviews by PA/ANPs overseen by a very busy ED consultant.

   Any re-presentation to ED always got a senior Dr review back in my day.

   It’s sad but being foreign often means you have to fight harder to be heard.

8. Mistakes are going to be made. Thousands of medical decisions made every day. Not every single one of them is going to be correct.

9. This reminds me of when I was 10 years old (1994) on holiday in Edinburgh with my family.

   I wasn’t feeling well and had vomited all over Princes St in front of the Scott Monument.

   My father managed to take me to the local doctor’s office who said I should take some painkillers and I’llbe fine in the morning.

   24 hours later my appendix was taken out by an Icelandic doctor at Ninewells, Dundee.

   Edit: because I was in hospital we had to to stay an extra day at our bed and breakfast, which meant my father managed to get a round at St Andrews Golf course with their first ever female caddie

10. This is awful. I’ve noticed most gps don’t even try and figure out what’s wrong anymore they just put people on loads of painkillers etc. so they can just about cope. Especially women. It’s your weight, period or anxiety 🙄 without actually investigating.

11. I’ve had sepsis and it’s horrendous and it terrifies me that something like this could happen to my kids too… I’m quite shocked this happened and there have been so many campaigns about watching out for the symptoms. It’s no joke… took me about five IV antiobiotics and an antiviral iv to get over it and I was an adult…

12. Some things never change. 30 odd years ago I was told to take calpol for a broken leg lol.

13. One of my relatives who is now on lifelong heart medication complained of their heart issues for months and weren’t taken seriously until things got really dire.

    Doctors kept telling her it was Acid Reflux when she had been complaining for weeks and weeks that it *definitely* wasn’t and they were treating and medicating her as such despite no actual evidence.

    No one wants to admit but some of them get an idea in their head, run with it and don’t consider alternatives or *actually listen* to the patients and operate on seemingly tunnel vision. They themselves will tell you not to do the same thing, funnily enough.

    Edit: My parent is actually going through some stuff right now regarding not getting appropriate care in a situation warranting it in the edited section of [this reply](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/awO1CLXK3D)

14. I’ve got a 4yo with non-speaking autism and a poor immune system. He gets a lot of infections, mainly ears or throat, sometimes UTIs, fairly normal stuff. But he doesn’t display symptoms until he’s really quite poorly, something about how he processes pain and discomfort is off, so infections can really set in over days before he (seemingly suddenly) becomes very unwell. Anyway, every single time I’ve had to take him to A&E, they’ve been dismissive and said he’s just got a virus, we’ve had to really push for them to do swabs and tests, and every time it’s been a bacterial infection that needs treatment right away. Exactly what happened to these poor parents is one of my biggest fears. Doctors really need to better understand autism, especially where autistic patients present with low level pain/fever symptoms, but are functioning so below their individual baseline that it’s evident something is very wrong.

15. Back in February my mum spent the month pretty much in and out of it, she was delirious pretty much most of the time. She was bed bound through MS, and had a catheter fitted 24/7. I was constantly phoning the GP, and she had been on as far as I can recall at least a half dozen antibiotics since December for UTI’s.

    It was either the 22nd or 23rd of February when one of my mum’s carers came in and told me she was eating tissue paper. Which was extremely abnormal behaviour for my mum. So I phoned the GP. The advanced nurse practitioner came out to check her over. I told her my mum was delirious, had lost the ability to do what little she could for herself and I was concerned about her eyesight as she had difficulty seeing things at certain angles.

    Now the nurse performed a check of her urine and asked my mum what colour her tunic was, which my mum answered correctly and the nurse left it at that. My mum was prescribed another antibiotic and I was told if it upset her stomach to stop it and phone back in to the surgery for another. Well on the Saturday she complained about a sore stomach so I stopped. First thing Monday morning I phoned the doctors. Just as I hung up the district nurses came in as they were attending my mum for another matter. Within five minutes the nurse had called an ambulance and my mum was taken to the local hospital. Two days later she passed at 10:30 am of sepsis.

16. oh jeez. taking calpol seems to be the default go-to reply anytime you call the doctors from what I’ve experienced. the alternative is to book a docs appt for like a weeks time, or sit in A&E for about 24 hours. I’m genuinely scared if any of my kids become sick 🙁

17. Had a wound that started to get septic, 6 hours into a 12hr visit to A&E with climbing heart rate and temperature. Not to mention unspeakable agony from the wound itself. They knew but had no resources to deal with it.

    Honestly the system doesn’t give a shit, the UK has millions of people, if one dies it’s just a blip. A row on a spreadsheet or entry in a database to delete. We are all disposable and easily replaceable to anyone but the people we’re closest to

18. Is this partly a result of too many people turning up to Accident and Emergency with a cold or a grazed knee? Perhaps doctors don’t take people seriously now as they expect to see something minor

19. The standard of GP (and practices) in this country is extremely disappointing. And the reluctance of them referring people to specialists or consultants is astonishing. Every time when I go to see a GP, they always come back and say, you look fine, come back if you keep on having discomforts so on and so forth. But another appointment means another week of waiting, by that time, I would either be fine or ended up in A&E.

20. I understand that but not that I have, if you were to lose a loved one when they should have been diagnosed, not good

21. I went to a&e with sepsis and was told to go home and gargle aspirin, 3 hours later my mum was told I needed to be in surgery within a couple of hours…

    Good job she woke me up from my post aspirin gargle eh…

22. I had sepsis. GP said I was fine. For hours later litres of infected blood and pus gushed out of a surgical wound on my hip and I was rushed to hospital and nearly died. Learned a lesson that day.

23. This is really sad. The fact that the mother was a qualified doctor in her home country and a pharmacy assistant here somehow makes it worse. Here was a doctor who took her 4 yo son to A & E four times the week before his death telling them something was wrong and wasn’t listened to, and then he died. I do wonder if she had been a UK qualified doctor if she’d have been listened to a bit more.

    On the other hand, sepsis can happen very suddenly and whenever I’ve taken my son to A & E they were always extremely thorough with his checks and vitals

24. Doctors need to be held accountable, they can’t keep getting away with this. Medical negligence is the third biggest killer in the Uk and US. Maybe if they faced consequences like us when we do something wrong they might start taking us seriously and saving lives.

25. The Royal Free hospital is one of the ones that signed up to Martha’s rule

    https://www.england.nhs.uk/2024/05/nhs-announces-143-hospitals-to-roll-out-marthas-rule/

    It’s supposed to allow patients to get an urgent second opinion, after staff ignored the parents of a 13yo girl with sepsis and caused her to die of it in 2021, much like this except the girl was already in hospital.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cndd41p5g82o

    I see they haven’t rolled it out, then.

26. Around 84,000 children under NHS care. As sad as this is, keep in mind that you’re not seeing 84,000 news articles like this each year. This is extremely unfortunate and a tragic event, but is far from being a common occurrence.

    In the meantime, let’s wait to see the outcome of the investigation.

27. These are all lies every one of them that he is. He is basically lying through every single app that there is, and I am making sure of it his name is David and I’m sorry that you’re going through what you’re going through but I’m going through a fantastic time. I’m working. I’m doing great and I’m doing good things. You just like to hear what you like to hear you’ve gotten into fights with enough people and I yeah I have to be honest with you. I really don’t care. I’m never gonna see any of these people again, so whoever wants to go right ahead, but none of it is true

28. There needs to be harsher penalties for doctors that misdiagnosed things like this, the amount of doctors especially recently that don’t even bother to read your notes before appointments anymore, big problem at firdale medical and junior doctor was able to change a patients file critically after only meeting them once for 3 minutes, problem was sorted went through gp manger and they stopped junior doctors having that power but jeez this is so bad my heart goes out to the family, it’s rare you find a doctor that actually cares these days