A mother’s desperate pleas for an ambulance to be sent to her house months before she was found dead alongside her daughter were not followed up, it has emerged. The bodies of Alphonsine Leuga, 47, and Loraine Choulla, 18, were found inside their council house in Radford, Nottingham, “weeks to months” after they died, an inquest into their deaths heard. Ms Leuga’s provisional cause of death was established as pneumonia of an uncertain cause, while Ms Choulla’s has not yet been disclosed. Ms Leuga, who was thought to have died weeks before she was found on May 21, 2024, was a carer for her daughter, who had Down Syndrome and learning disabilities.
The 47-year-old had been admitted to Nottingham City Hospital between January 26 and 28, 2024, in a state of “critical illness”, a hearing at Nottingham Crown Court was told this week. She underwent a blood transfusion of three litres for low iron levels and was diagnosed with a respiratory tract infection, but was discharged “pragmatically” to care for her daughter, who was “entirely dependent” on her.
Just a week after her discharge, Ms Leuga phoned 999 and pleaded with a call handler for an ambulance to be sent to her address, the Nottingham Post reports.
A transcript of the exchange showed the single mother saying: “I need some help please. I need help to my daughter. I feel cold. I am on the bed. I feel cold and can’t move. Please send an ambulance. I do not want police. I need ambulance … my daughter. Would you send an ambulance? Please come, please.”
She was asked multiple times what language she spoke and was made to repeat her address multiple times during the call, which eventually cut off. Attempts were made to ring Ms Leuga back, the court heard, but an emergency medical advisor ultimately dediced to follow the “abandoned call process” and not dispatch an ambulancew to the scene.
“They followed the abandoned call process when they shouldn’t have because they had an address and a phone number,” Susan Jevons, head of patient safety at the East Midlands Ambulance Service, said.
“The abandoned call process should only be used for hoax calls,” she added. “There was a missed opportunity for an ambulance to attend [Ms Leuga’s] address.” The hearing reached a consensus that, had emergency services responded to the call in the proper way, it could have “made a difference between life and death for [Ms Choulla]”.
Pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton told the court he couldn’t rule out the possibility that Ms Leuga had died on the day she made the 999 call.
“On the balance of probabilities, it is likely Ms Leuga had been dead for a period of weeks to months based on the extent of post-mortem change,” he said.
Ms Choulla was thought to have been dead for a similar timeframe, and the court heard that she had been entirely reliant on her mother for her nutritional and hydrational needs.
The hearing was also told that staff had since been told to re-read the protocols for abandoned calls and, since February 2024, had recorded no similar incidents.