A student with anorexia starved to death after a series of NHS failures, a report finds today.
Former grammar school pupil Averil Hart, 19, was let down by every part of the organisation that should have cared for her, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman says.
Yet the four NHS bodies refused to take responsibility for the tragedy and instead were ‘defensive and protective of themselves’, the report says.
Ombudsman Rob Behrens warned that the case was only one example of ‘widespread problems with adult eating disorders services in the NHS’.
Miss Hart’s family, from Sudbury in Suffolk, last night condemned the ‘Third World care’ that had led to their daughter’s death – and asked why took five years for officials to uncover the failures.
She was found collapsed in her university room after losing 2st – nearly a third of her body weight – in less than three months.
Doctors had not properly tracked her weight or her mental health, and after she was rushed to A&E, two hospitals made basic blunders that accelerated her death.
Miss Hart, who had achieved five A*s at A-level at Colchester Royal Grammar School before starting a creative writing degree at the University of East Anglia, died on December 15, 2012.
When her family raised concerns about the care she had received, the NHS response was ‘piecemeal’ and ‘appeared evasive’, the report found.
Crucial emails relating to Miss Hart’s care were deleted in an apparent cover-up, and complaint handling by the two hospitals was so poor that it was defined as ‘maladministration’.
