A 14-year-old girl died after an emergency night-time operation during which medics were forced to use a torch to make sure there was enough light to work by.
Emma Welch underwent surgery on a ward because the two available operating theatres at Bristol children’s hospital were in use on the night she suffered complications.
As the ward was not bright enough a torch was used to cast more light on Emma, who had originally gone into hospital for a relatively routine spinal procedure.
Relatives of the teenager, who completed a charity walk on Mount Snowdon days before she went into hospital, have called for more theatres and staff to be available at night. The hospital has said it is incredibly rare for three theatres to be needed at night and said that all the appropriate staff were on duty.
Emma went into the children’s hospital to correct a curvature of her spine but the night after that procedure she suffered internal bleeding and needed emergency surgery. It was night time and only two of nine operating theatres at the hospital were open, both of which were in use, so medics operated on her on a ward, her inquest heard on Wednesday. She was lost blood rapidly, and died at 3.42am on 4 June last year.
After the inquest, at Avon coroner’s court, Emma’s mother, Lesley Welch, 51, said she wanted more operating theatres to be open at night. “There are nine theatres at the Bristol children’s hospital and at the time Emma died it was normal for only two of them to every be used at night time. On the night she died, there were two operations already going on. We hope they will have the capacity to man three or four theatres depending on the scale of the incident.”
Emma’s grandfather, Anthony Close, added: “Without there being an available theatre, emergency chest surgery on Emma had finally to be performed in her hospital bed with the help of torch light. We appreciate all that the staff did to the best of their abilities to try and save Emma and we know that such a traumatic experience must have affected them deeply. However, unanswered questions still remain and we will vigorously pursue these.”
Margrid Schindler, a consultant, who had cared for Emma in intensive care, said ideally the teenager would have been taken to theatre straight away. She told the inquest: “The doctor went to theatre but the problem was we had our two emergency teams busy in theatre. There was no team available at that particular moment to get Emma to theatre any earlier.”
Ian Harding, a spinal surgeon, who carried out the original procedure, said the team resorted to resuscitating Emma on her bed when her heart stopped. But he disputed the notion that she would have survived had she been taken to theatre earlier; he said things would only have been different if the problem had been identified more quickly.
He told the inquest: “If we had got her to theatre half an hour, an hour earlier, I think the outcome would have been exactly the same.” Asked if Emma’s life could have been saved, he said: “I think if we had known exactly what was happening straight away, from minute one, then yes.”
Harding, who rushed to the hospital to care for Emma after being woken up at 1am, said inquiries were continuing over how she came to suffer the complications that led to her death.
The coroner Maria Voisin concluded that Emma had died “from the unintended consequence of planned and necessary medical treatment”. She said she died despite the efforts [involving giving] numerous blood transfusions and chest compressions.
In statement read in court, Welch described her daughter as an extraordinary girl who had a zest for life and making a difference. “She was bright and bubbly, a girl who enjoyed sharing a smile and a laugh. The impact of our loss is just too huge to begin to describe.”
After the hearing, Bryony Strachan, clinical chair of women’s and children’s services at University Hospitals Bristol NHS foundation trust, said: “We offer our sincere condolences to Emma’s family for her loss. We cannot imagine the devastating impact this has had on their lives. The coroner heard that the complication Emma experienced was incredibly rare. Whilst any surgery or treatment carries risks, we do our utmost to ensure that we keep the children in our care safe. As a hospital we will always review these rare circumstances, to make the treatment and surgery we give as safe as possible.”
Four days before she died Emma, of Chilcompton, Somerset, and her parents hosted a teddy bears’ picnic on top of Mount Snowdon after carrying 135 cuddly toys up the mountain on a walk in aid of Brain Tumour Research, a charity for which she raised funds.
