Mum died after medics checked wrong patient's 'do not resuscitate' note, family claim

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

A beloved mum died in hospital after medics checked the wrong patient's notes and found a 'do not resuscitate' form. Pat Dawson, 73, had never been admitted to hospital before she was taken ill in an ambulance on the evening of September 19 of last year, according to her family.

Within four hours, the much-loved mum, from Rawtenstall, Lancashire, was dead. An inquest into Pat's death is due to take place next week.

It follows an investigation by the East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, that found nurses may have mistakenly checked the wrong patient's records before halting CPR, Lancs Live reports. READ MORE: Halloween prop sparks alert amid investigation into human remains found in Salford Pat's daughter-in-law, Paula Dawson, said: "She was taken by ambulance to A&E at Royal Blackburn Hospital around 5pm with a suspected stomach blockage; by 9.30pm she was dead. "During those short hours she went into cardiac arrest, the hospital staff checked 'her 'records' and said she was DNR so she was left to die.

Five minutes later the staff realised the wrong records had been checked and she wasn't DNR. If she had been resuscitated who will ever know if she would have survived." Paula, who lives with Pat's son John in Whitewell Bottom in Rossendale, said alarm bells had rung when her husband had called her from the hospital to tell her about the DNR form. "I said to him 'no she didn't have one, she would have told us'," she added. "But also, she'd never been ill before, or in hospital, so she couldn't have had one. "About 20 minutes after Pat died a senior nurse went to see John in the family room and said 'there's been a mix-up'." After Pat had died, John was sat in the room with her when, on three