Girl died during operation (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Girl died during operation

3:15pm Wednesday 21st November 2007 in Swindon By Gazette Reporter

A five-year-old girl died during an operation to remove her spleen when surgeons used a new piece of equipment without her parents' knowledge, an inquest heard today.

Bethany Bowen 'collapsed' during the procedure at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where the morcellator, a coring device with a blade, was used.

The girl's father Richard Bowen told the hearing at Oxford Coroner's Court that he and his wife were unaware that the morcellator was new and assumed it was a standard piece of equipment.

He said after his daughter's death they were told by surgeons that the blade had cut through a major blood vessel.

Bethany, who lived with her parents Richard and Clare and two brothers in Cricklade, Wiltshire, suffered from a hereditary condition called spherocytosis.

It involves the body producing the wrong-shaped red blood cells which are attacked and destroyed by the spleen. This causes anaemia which can only be cured by removing the spleen.

The inquest heard that her brother William also had the condition and had his spleen removed in an operation when he was two.

Mr. Bowen said that despite her condition Bethany was a "happy and lively" little girl who had had a "whale of a time" during her first year at school.

He said school did however tire her out and she suffered from jaundice.

He told the inquest in July 2006 he took a week off work to be with Bethany in hospital where she was due for the operation and signed a consent form.

But the operation went wrong and Mr Bowen said he and his wife were told by doctors that "they had cut through a blood vessel and she had died".

He said: "It was too much of a shock to take in."

He told the inquest that the following Monday they had a chance to sit down with the surgeons and discuss what had happened.

He said: "They described what they had used and while they were using the morcellator that Beth had collapsed.

When asked by coroner Dr. Richard Whittington if they would have given their consent if they knew a different method was to be used Mr. Bowen said: "We absolutely and completely trusted the people involved.

"If they had said they were using a new piece of equipment they had never used before that was a different matter.

"You would think: "It is a new piece of equipment - why are they using it now?". We assumed that the morcellator was a standard piece of equipment."

Mrs. Bowen told the inquest that they had agreed to the surgery on the terms that there was no other option or choice available.

Dr. Stephen Gould, a consultant paediatric pathologist who carried out the post mortem told the inquest that he had never before seen the type the internal injuries he found in Bethany's body.

He said there were three cuts to the aorta and damage to the stomach, a small valve and small blood vessels.

He said her death was "associated with her surgery" but in his opinion the blood loss was not sufficient to have caused it.

He said: "Surgery was a trigger to an event, but we are not clear what that event was."

The hearing is continuing