Disabled woman discharged from hospital with undiagnosed fractures, investigation said

A disabled woman who died days after nursing home workers dropped her was released from hospital the day of her fall with undiagnosed broken ribs and a broken left arm, an investigation has reported.

Lyn Parker, 64, broke her ribs and both arms when she fell at least 5 feet after two caregivers tried to lift her from her wheelchair to her bed in a sling at the Tudor Avenue residential care home in Hampton , south London.

Ms Parker, from Kingston upon Thames, was in the flat for more than three hours before an ambulance arrived on January 15, 2021, the West London Coroner’s Court heard.

He died 10 days later at Kingston Hospital on January 25, 2021.

A hospital consultant told the court on Tuesday that the main cause of Ms Parker’s death was “aspiration pneumonia”.

lyn parker — Lyn Parker died at Kingston Hospital in January 2021 (Family Handout/PA)

Ms Parker, who was not speaking, was taken to the hospital alone in an ambulance.

She was released in the early hours of January 16, but had to be brought back in the morning after a nursing home worker discovered her left arm was “swollen and black.”

Dr. Sumit Dutta, consultant emergency medicine at Kingston Hospital, treated Ms. Parker on January 15.

Jurors heard from his statement that Ms. Parker was “combatant” with his attempts to examine her and that he treated her for a broken right arm and what he believed was a reaction to the morphine the jurors had administered. paramedics.

In a second statement, he added: “In retrospect, I should have arranged for a pantraumatic CT scan.

“At that time I believed that the lesions identified explained his symptoms.

“It should have had a lower threshold to widen the examination network.”

Dr Dutta said that if the scan had been ordered, Ms Parker would have been admitted to hospital and not released that day.

Dr. Khalid Mohammed Ali, a fellow consultant in emergency medicine at the hospital, co-led an internal investigation into Ms. Parker’s care.

Excerpts from her court report detailing “a misdiagnosis of fractured ribs and a fractured left humerus” were read at Ms Parker’s first appearance at the hospital.

However, Dr Ali wrote that he did not believe “early recognition” would have changed the final outcome because Ms Parker was an “extremely frail and vulnerable adult” with “multiple comorbid conditions” and “extremely limited physiological reserve”.

Presenting evidence Tuesday, the doctor said a full trauma CT scan, performed on January 16 when Ms Parker returned to the hospital, showed “multiple rib fractures on the right side” and doctors found a “fracture in the left humerus of the left arm”. .

She said it was not discovered during her first presentation to the hospital because there was no swelling and the nonverbal Ms Parker couldn’t tell she was in pain.

“If a patient can’t verbalize and tell you there’s pain, you might miss it,” he added. “That’s why at the first presentation there was no X-ray on the left arm.”

He agreed that the initial medical team should have “broadened the scope of their investigation” and ordered a “trauma CT scan”, but insisted that it would not have changed the final result.

“Unfortunately, in the case of Ms. Lyn Parker… the primary cause of death was aspiration pneumonia,” he said. “I don’t think the result will change in the 12 hour difference between the first and the second performance.”

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