Parents of toddler who died from flu after hospital failings speak out on five-year wait for answers

The bereaved parents of a toddler who died from the flu after a “catalogue of failings” by a hospital say they are still waiting for answers about their daughter’s tragic death.

Cristiana Banciu died in January 2020 after a rare reaction to the flu, while under the care of King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

In 2021, an inquest identified multiple failings by trust staff, who it found had “failed to provide basic medical attention” to the two-year-old.

Three years later, the trust agreed to pay her parents Alexandru and Georgiana £25,000 following a civil claim for bereavement costs and to cover Cristiana’s funeral expenses.

However, the couple say the trust has not admitted legal liability or sent a formal apology directly to them – an apology has only come via the media.

The parents want reassurance that such a tragic event will not happen again.

At Cristiana’s inquest, assistant coroner Jacqueline Devonish said healthcare professionals had “failed to provide basic medical attention”, which contributed to her death. The coroner could not, on the balance of probabilities, say that she would have survived had she been treated sooner, but suggested that she would probably have had a better chance, describing the failure to record her score on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) as “very serious”.

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Source: The Independent, 3 January 2025