Hospital not to blame for nurse's death - inquest

A hospital where a student nurse died from sepsis was not to blame for her death, an inquest has found.

Zoe Bell died on 24 December 2022 after waiting 12 hours in A&E at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where she had been working shifts.

Senior Buckinghamshire Coroner Crispin Butler concluded the 28-year-old died from a "rare and complex lung infection" and said the hospital did have some "learning" to do but that it did not negatively impact Ms Bell's outcome.

Andrew McLaren, chief medical officer at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, said there were a "number of factors that contributed to the issues" the night Ms Bell died, including a lack of observations.

The inquest heard how Ms Bell arrived at the hospital at 22:14 GMT on 23 December but was not assessed by doctors until 07:30 on Christmas Eve.

It found hospital staff had not kept a log of Ms Bell's condition between 23:34 on 23 December and 10:00 the next day.

Mr Butler said this did not "represent evidence of a systemic failure" but reflected "the pressures during that shift" for the hospital's staff.

Ms Bell's cause of death was as staphylococcal aureus septicaemia and bronchopneumonia with acute lung failure, combined with influenza B.

Mr McLaren told the inquest a number of interactions with Ms Bell had not been documented and that the hospital had been recognised as having "insufficient bed stock".

"It wasn't that nobody was coming to see her [Zoe], but they were making clinical decisions at the time that she was OK."

He said there was an "incredibly rapid deterioration" in the 28-year-old's condition which surprised doctors, who thought she seemed fine at the time.

Since her death, he said the hospital had stopped using agency staff and increased its staffing in the A&E department and increased the presence of senior medical doctors on wards.

He said: "It is noted that the coroner concluded that, sadly, there was not an opportunity to provide any care following Zoe's admission to hospital which would have avoided her decline, and she died of natural causes from a rare combination of infections."

In a statement after the inquest, Ms Bell's father, Nick Bell, said he hoped his daughter's legacy - and the kindness and love she showed others - would live on.

"We want doctors to have great awareness of the symptoms of these infections in healthy young people... it is difficult to comprehend that an otherwise healthy 28-year-old who had flu can go to A&E with a serious viral infection and pass away within 20 hours."

Speaking to the BBC afterwards, he said his daughter was "clearly very poorly".

"Zoe, being a nurse, wouldn't have gone to hospital if she wasn't very poorly," he added.

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