Pacemaker op was "torture"

Adam Hewitt • Published 25 Feb 2010 11:00 0 Comments

THE family of a former teacher who died soon after an operation she described as "pure torture" have condemned the standard of care she received in her final hours.

Elizabeth Ingram, 82, an anti-apartheid campaigner and friend of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, died at Royal Berkshire Hospital on May 1 last year.

A Reading inquest heard on Tuesday that she suffered a rare and catastrophic blood circulation failure, called an aortic dissection (AD), leading to internal bleeding.

But this did not show up in tests when she was admitted to RBH on April 30 suffering chest pains and fainting spells, three weeks after surgery at the London Heart Hospital to replace her aortic valve.

Instead doctors diagnosed a more common heart problem and fitted a pacemaker under a local anaesthetic, despite her family's wishes for her to fully sedated before the procedure. Dr Jon Swinburn admitted she had been "in a lot of distress".

AD is dubbed "the great masquerader" because of its unpredictable symptoms and Dr Swinburn said it was so serious there was little he could have done for Mrs Ingram even had it been diagnosed immediately.

Berkshire coroner Peter Bedford's narrative verdict reiterated that the AD caused her death, although its timing was "unclear".

Speaking afterwards Mrs Ingram's son, Christopher, catering manager for Reading Buses, who lived with his mother in Reading Road, Pangbourne, said: "We're going to certainly take it further because we feel that the patient care was just totally unacceptable. It was like the Third World. She was left to freeze, it was just quite dreadful."

Hospital trust spokeswoman Nicola Wesson said after the inquest: "Mrs Ingram's family raised a number of queries regarding their mother's care with the Trust last year. We made a full response at the time and arranged for the family to meet with the clinicians involved in Mrs Ingram's care so that they could ask questions and receive the response directly.

"We also wrote to the family to fully address these issues and to apologise for any areas where the family felt that the care we provided was inadequate.

"We hope that the inquest and the coroner's summary has given the family another opportunity to raise their concerns and to be assured that the care provided in no way contributed to Mrs Ingram's death."

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