Mum continues legal battle after daughter’s death

Mar 16 2008 by Coreena Ford, Sunday Sun

A YOUNG woman at the centre of a legal battle after claiming medics left her paralysed has died, we can reveal.

Melanie Rutherford, 34, passed away in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead last week, just weeks after launching a High Court action against three North health trusts for negligence.

Paramedics claimed she had a “history of faking seizures” but Melanie had hoped to clear her name at a hearing in October.

She vowed to prove she had been left quadriplegic and incontinent because ambulance crews and hospital staff allegedly failed to realise she had broken her neck.

Last night, her devastated mother Marion, 56, pledged to continue with the court case.

She said: “I will fight on for some justice for Melanie . . . she would not want me to stop now.

“It’s just so tragic that she battled so long and was always such a fighter, always wearing a smile, yet now she won’t get to reach her goal and won’t even see the outcome of the court case.”

Wheelchair-user Melanie — who had to be fed through a tube — had been living in a young persons’ disabled unit in Whickham, Gateshead, receiving round-the-clock care ever since suffering a fall in July, 2002.

While living in supported accommodation she fell in the kitchen of her home, and it is alleged that paramedics asked her to stand and tried to lift her under the arms, despite her complaining of pain in her left arm, back and neck.

In their notes, the ambulance crew recorded she had no injuries and she was not taken to hospital.

An ambulance was called again the next morning, and it’s claimed their notes read: “This young woman has a history of ‘faked’ seizures and appears to have done this last evening.”

Melanie was eventually treated at Newcastle General Hospital eight days after the fall, and was later transferred to the spinal High Dependency Unit at South Cleveland Hospital.

Melanie was suing three trusts . . . Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust, North East Ambulance Service NHS Trust, and Northgate and Prudhoe NHS Trust.

Marion said: “She had suffered from chronic epilepsy since she was five and never faked a seizure in her life.”

Marion was being comforted by her two sons, Chris, 25, and Steven, 30, and says it will take time to come to terms with losing her daughter.

She said: “I knew she was desperately ill but when she died on Thursday it was still such a shock.

“She died from a kidney infection and septicaemia, and I’ve been told she would not have felt a thing.”