A five-year-old girl suffering from worrying symptoms sent home from A&E was found dead by her mum hours later. Little Lila Marsland was discharged with “tonsilitis” after having been rushed to hospital in December 2023 as she had problems moving her neck, struggled to pee, had a sore throat, high heart rate, was vomiting and felt lethargic.
She started feeling unwell when two days after Christmas she complained of a headache during an outing with her mum and dad, Darren Marsland, on her new bike. Rachael, who worked as a nurse, asked medics if her daughter could be suffering from meningitis, but after tests and a review by an experienced paediatric doctor it was decided Lila was more likely to be suffering from tonsilitis.
She was sent home with antibiotics and a throat spray at about 2am on December 28, but around eight hours later Rachael found her in bed unresponsive.
Rachael told the Manchester Evening News paramedics arrived within minutes of a 999 call and Lila was given CPR. She added: “But it was already too late. It’s horrendous. I still can’t believe it’s happened.”
Signs of meningitis bacteria were indicated in fluid surrounding Lila’s brain during an early investigation and an inquest in June saw a jury conclude her death was preventable.
Jurors examining the care and treatment Lila received at Tameside General Hospital in Greater Manchester also found her death was “contributed to by neglect”.
Coronor Chris Morris issued a prevention of future deaths report in which Health Secretary Wes Streeting was told of concerns over missing medical information related to Lila’s case.
Rachael has also raised serious concerns about how patient information continues to be stored and shared in a “fragmented and disjointed way” by hospitals nationwide.
Minister of State for Secondary Care, Karin Smyth, responded to the coroner’s report in September, but Rachael said she was appalled by the “copy and paste” reply.
Rachael said: “We were seen in A&E and those notes were recorded on an electronic system. Then we went to paediatric A&E, where the notes were all recorded on paper. Then the medical handover sheet which listed that the advanced nurse practitioner feared meningitis was never given over to the doctor, the doctor never saw that.”
Rachael said the minister’s response didn’t address anything in relation to Tameside General Hospital, focusing instead on what had been done nationally since 2022 and the amount of money pumped into the system. She added: “The minister said the Government is going to work with secondary [hospital] trusts and NHS England to look at the areas of improvement, but she doesn’t really expand on what’s being done there.
“She mentions maternity deaths, which is quite a hot topic at the moment with all the maternity scandals, but there’s nothing about paediatric care. How’s it going to prevent anything happening? That’s the whole point of the prevention of future death reports. It’s as though she’s copied and pasted some of that.”
The letter points to an inspection of Tameside by a health watchdog, which was reportedly rated “good”, but the minister fails to address what went wrong with Lila’s care or improvements made since. Ms Smyth said in the letter: “I agree that ensuring health and care professionals have access to a single source of digital information about the patients they are treating and caring for is vitally important to delivering the best care possible.”
Rachael said she now fears errors could arise from different trusts using varying digital systems and records stored electronically might not be easy to transfer if a patient such as Lila has to be moved to a different hospital trust for treatment. The minister said this would be addressed by a new single patient record system which can be used by all trusts for each patient, due to be rolled out in three years.
The hospital trust has apologised and accepted there were failings. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson responded, saying: “Our deepest sympathies are with Lila’s family following their devastating loss. This Government is determined to make sure that mistakes made in the past are not repeated.”