Trust Prosecuted Over Two Children’s Deaths From Sepsis
The care regulator has brought three charges against Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust alleging care was “not provided in a safe way”. Two concern a three-year-old who died within ten hours of arriving at hospital with a temperature of 40C, having waited more than seven hours for intravenous antibiotics. The trust’s local sepsis guidance had not been updated since 2017.
The third charge concerns a two-year-old discharged in April 2024 who died two days later. At her inquest the assistant coroner Stephen Simblet KC found that a doctor of appropriate seniority had been unavailable for two and a half hours and that she was sent home by a “very junior doctor”. The trust’s chief executive Adam Sewell-Jones says it is “working closely” with the regulator and that with a legal process under way “it would be inappropriate to comment further”. Two things make this worth a column slot rather than a court listing. The first is that prosecuting a hospital trust over the care of individual patients remains unusual, and the charges are brought under the legislation governing safe care rather than through a coroner or a negligence claim. The second is the 2017 date: guidance nine years out of date at the time of a death is a systems finding, not an individual one. Pleas are expected at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on 3 December. This rests on one outlet’s reporting, which says it learned of the charges rather than citing a published listing.