Parents seek second inquest into baby's hospital death

The parents of a baby who died after medical errors are to push for a new inquest into his death, after they say a "cruel" inquest denied them justice.

Hayden Nguyen died in 2016 after medics failed to treat an infection properly. However, despite the NHS trust admitting mistakes, coroner Shirley Radcliffe concluded the infant died of natural causes, after raising concerns about the hospital's initial investigation.

Hayden was six days old when his parents took him to the Chelsea and Westminster hospital in west London in August 2016. He initially had a fever but rapidly deteriorated; he had a cardiac arrest and died within 12 hours of arriving there.

An internal NHS investigation concluded eight errors were made in Hayden's care, and the root causes of his death were failure to identify the signs of shock and failure to act on abnormal test results.

"When they had completed the investigation, they sat us down and took us through it line by line," says Alex Nguyen, Hayden's mother. "Although the content was incredibly disturbing, it was in a way healing and it helped a little bit with the grieving process."

An inquest at Westminster Coroner's Court, conducted by Dr Radcliffe, followed. However, the coroner was not happy with the hospital's investigation.

The hospital to issue a second report into Hayden's care, which halved the number of errors, and said the root cause of his death was the infection "which is known to have a high mortality".

Armed with this second report, the coroner concluded that Hayden had died of natural causes.

"What the coroner did was kill Hayden a second time," Hayden's father, Tum, told the BBC.

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Source: BBC News, 14 May 2021