A three-month-old baby Lewys Crawford died of sepsis after waiting for 8 hours for life-saving antibiotics.
At the inquest into his death, his devastated mother Kirsty Link told that it took the doctors so long for her baby to be diagnosed with meningococcal septicemia.
Ms. Link said at the inquest: “We are both concerned about the timeline of events leading up to Lewis’s death, particularly the delay between him being admitted to the unit to him getting the first course of antibiotics.”
“I am concerned about the length of time it took to get the diagnosis.”
Lewys, from Llanederyn, Cardiff, had become unwell as he turned purple and ballooned in size.
They took him to the paediatric A&E department where a nurse, Miss Murphy, suspected Lewys had sepsis but the doctors dismissed the symptoms saying, he had a virus.
Paediatric emergency unit nurse Rebecca Murphy told that the unit had been “extremely busy” on that night as an emergency nurse practitioner and a pediatric consultant were missing.
16 patients were waiting to be seen by a doctor so Miss Murphy was then told it would take a half-hour to get Lewys a bed.
Miss Murphy said she did not feel he was safe enough to be transferred to the ward.
She said: “I felt Lewys needed a line and antibiotics just from my understanding of sepsis.”
He was then transferred to Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospital where he was diagnosed with meningococcal septicemia.
However, Dr. Mower didn’t think Lewys had sepsis. Dr. Mower said: “You see a lot of children with temperatures which turns out not to be meningococcal septicaemia.”
“It’s quite rare to see someone as young as three months and the children I have seen [with meningococcal septicaemia] have been older.”
The family waited for 8 hours for life-saving antibiotics before Lewys died of sepsis.
An independent expert has been told to look into Lewys’s death and the inquest continues.
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