Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has apologized for failures that caused the death of a healthy three-year-old girl. Staff at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex, did not notice that Zadie Ajetunmobi exhibited signs of the deadly infection sepsis and wrongly diagnosed her with tonsillitis. Doctors, therefore, did not administer life-saving antibiotics, and the child suffered a fatal cardiac arrest within hours.
The Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, which oversees Broomfield Hospital, admitted fault and said the little girl would still be alive if staff had correctly followed medical guidelines regarding sepsis. The Trust apologized to the child’s devastated father following a hearing at the Chelmsford Coroner’s Court.
In a letter to the Coroner’s Court, the Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust clearly spelled out what had gone wrong. “Had the sepsis pathway been triggered at triage, intravenous antibiotics would have been administered to Zadie within an hour,” it stated. The Trust, which investigated Zadie’s death, found that staff wrongly assessed “the child early warning tool (CWT) score,” and she was therefore not examined by an “appropriate senior clinician.”
Zadie Ajetunmobi attended Broomfield’s Emergency Room in November 2022 with a high temperature and died ten hours later. Her cause of death was identified as sepsis, which occurs when the body wrongly responds to infection. Instead of fighting disease, the body begins to attack its own organs, causing them to malfunction. This can then progress to septic shock, which causes blood pressure to drop to dangerous levels, impacting the kidneys, lungs, liver, and other crucial organs.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that around 1.7 million Americans develop sepsis every year. The condition causes around 350,000 deaths annually and is the third-highest cause of death in American hospitals. In 2004, a group named the Surviving Sepsis Campaign issued guidelines on treating the condition, which helped to bring the number of deaths down. However, between 2019 and 2021, figures started rising again, increasing from 277 per 100,000 to 331. Experts say 80% of sepsis deaths could be prevented if the infection is spotted early.
