Tragedy of baby given ten times too much medicine

A FOUR-month-old baby died after she was given a medication overdose because a Barnsley GP surgery issued a wrong prescription, a coroner said.

An inquest heard how Abbie Jones, who had Down's syndrome and a hole in her heart, died when she received 10 times her normal dose of the drug Frusemide.

Coroner Chris Dorries said this happened because an inaccurate prescription was issued by the Sheffield Road surgery in Barnsley.

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An inquest in Sheffield heard differing accounts of how the wrongly marked prescription was generated by receptionist Julia Dransfield and signed by GP Dean Warwosz.

Mr Dorries concluded the evidence of neither of these key witnesses was reliable, adding: "The exact circumstances in which the prescription was signed by a doctor remain unclear."

The coroner said he will write to the Chief Medical Officer to ask him to investigate whether it could be made impossible for surgery receptionists to generate anything other than repeat prescriptions.

In a narrative verdict, Mr Dorries said: "Abbie Jones died at Sheffield Children's Hospital on June 3, 2006, in direct consequence of prescribed Frusemide medication that had been given between April 24 and May 1."

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He went on: "The overdose arose because a prescription was wrongly issued on April 24, 2006, which increased Abbie's medication tenfold.

"The prescription was wrongly generated on the surgery computer as a result of established or recognised procedures not being followed within the practice."

Earlier in the long-running inquest, Abbie's mother, Maxine Winfield, of Worsbrough, near Barnsley, broke down in tears when she described how she would never have given her daughter more than the prescribed dosage. Mr Dorries attached no blame to Miss Winfield for what happened.

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