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An inquest jury has found there were “gross failings in care amounting to neglect” before a woman had a heart attack at a private mental health hospital due to complications from drinking excessive amounts of water.

Lillian Lucas, 28, known as Lily to her family and friends, died in September 2022 after being found unresponsive in her room on Milton ward at the Cygnet hospital in Kewstoke, near Weston-super-Mare, where she had been an inpatient since June.

An inquest jury at Avon coroner’s court found on Wednesday that opportunities were missed by staff to render care that would have prevented Lucas’s death, including a failure to monitor her worsening condition and inadequate response to her deterioration.

On 8 September 2022 she was found unresponsive in her room after drinking excessive amounts of water and transferred to Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI), the jury heard. She died the following day. Postmortem examinations found she died of a heart attack and the impact of psychogenic polydipsia, when due to a mental disorder a person experiences an uncontrollable urge to drink water.

The jury concluded on Wednesday that there were “gross failings in her care amounting to neglect”. In the record of the inquest, the jury said the Milton ward was “understaffed at a level deemed to be unsafe”.

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Source: Guardian, 24 April 2024

An NIHR and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funded study has revealed that Long Covid leads to ongoing inflammation which can be detected in blood. 

This suggests that existing drugs which help treat conditions that affect the body’s immune system could be helpful in treating Long Covid, and should be investigated in future clinical trials. The study, which has been published in Nature Immunology, is from two collaborative UK-wide consortia, PHOSP-COVID and ISARIC-4C. These involve scientists and clinicians from universities across the UK, including Imperial College London and the Universities of Leicester, Edinburgh and Liverpool, among others.

The research compared 426 people who were experiencing symptoms consistent with Long Covid with 233 people who were also hospitalised for Covid-19 but had fully recovered. The researchers took samples of blood plasma and measured a total of 368 proteins known to be involved in inflammation and immune system modulation.

They found that, relative to patients who had fully recovered, those with Long Covid showed a pattern of immune system activation indicating inflammation of myeloid cells and activation of a family of immune system proteins called the complement system.

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Source: NIHR, 11 April 2024