Hospital superbug killed couple minutes apart
Pastor Dale Morgan
Hospital superbug killed couple minutes apart*
Last Updated: 12:12am BST 27/10/2007
A married couple died within minutes of each other holding hands after
they contracted a hospital superbug.
Now their daughter is threatening to take legal action against the Royal
Devon and Exeter Hospital.
Rosemary and Lye Owen, Superbug killed couple just minutes apart
Rosemary and Lye Owen died at the
Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital in January
Nina Griffith, from Exeter, has lodged a formal complaint against the
hospital after her mother and stepfather died of Clostridium difficile
this year.
Rosemary Owen, 70, and her husband Lionel, 80, died within 20 minutes of
each other in the intensive care unit on Jan 10.
An Exeter inquest heard evidence which suggested that Mr Owen, known as
Lye, contracted C diff from his wife who was infected during a dialysis
session at the hospital in mid-December.
Both started suffering with severe diarrhoea and were admitted to the
hospital within a day of each other.
Over the next two days their conditions worsened and a decision was
taken to turn off their life support machines.
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Dr Elizabeth Earland, the Greater Devon coroner, recorded a verdict of
misadventure into Mr Owen's death. An inquest was not held into his
wife's death.
She said: "An investigation identified that the strain of C diff
identified in Mr Owen and his wife Rosemary are identical.
"Mr Owen may well have been exposed to the organism by his wife who
first showed signs of the disease.
"The cause of death given by the post mortem was intracranial
haemorrhage due to anti coagulation, due to an increase in Warfarin
activity as a consequence of C difficile."
After the inquest Mrs Griffith stated that she felt the hospital had let
her parents down.
She said: "It is desperate, absolutely awful, to watch your parents die
like that. The staff were really good and wheeled my dad's bed into my
mum's cubicle so when they died they were holding hands.
"They were both unconscious by that stage but at least they were together.
"I think somebody is to blame. I don't know who but someone needs to
hold up their hands and say 'we did it wrong'.
"The system failed them and I just want somebody to say sorry. I'm
prepared to go to court.
"I spoke to the coroner's officer on the phone and said, my mum caught C
diff from the hospital, passed it on to my dad and it killed them both,
to which he said 'that seems to be the case'.
"The last stages of their lives were so undignified.
"I cannot remember nice things about them any more because I can only
remember that last day.
"I won't drop it. It has wiped out a generation of my family."
The couple died a month before their 20th wedding anniversary and they
were cremated together on what would have been Mrs Owen's 71st birthday.
Mr Owen died from a brain haemorrhage and his wife died of heart failure
with C diff a contributory factor.
Mr Owen was a research and development officer for the General Electric
Company and was awarded the Imperial Service Medal for helping to invent
the technology used in TV detector vans.
Peter Adney, the hospital's acting director of operations, said: "We are
thoroughly investigating a complaint received from the family about the
loss of Mr and Mrs Owen.
"The circumstances related to their loss are complex and we intend to do
all we can to explain to their family what happened."