Health secretary meets uncle of boy who died after being sent home from Rotherham Hospital

The family of a boy who died after being sent home from a hospital's emergency department say they are confident a new investigation will give them the "answers" they want.

Five-year-old Yusuf Mahmud Nazir died on 23 November 2022, eight days after he was seen at Rotherham Hospital and sent home with antibiotics.

A report into Yusuf’s case, by independent consultants and published last year by NHS South Yorkshire, found that his care was appropriate and “an admission was not clinically required”.

The family have always disputed that claim and were given the go-ahead last week for a new independent investigation, led by former general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing Peter Carter.

On Monday Yusuf's uncle Zaheer Ahmed met health secretary Wes Streeting to discuss the terms of the investigation.

During the meeting, Mr Streeting told him: "I do not want to sit in front of other families who are going through the intolerable grief that you're going through."

Mr Ahmed said: "We're confident we're going to get the answers. We know what the answers are - we just need them to investigate and give us the answers and [tell us] what's going to be done next to stop it from happening again."

Yusuf, who had asthma, was taken to the GP with a sore throat and feeling unwell on 15 November 2022. He was prescribed antibiotics by an advanced nurse practitioner.

Later that evening his family took him to Rotherham Hospital Urgent and Emergency Care Centre (UECC), where he was seen in the early hours of the morning after a six-hour wait.

He was discharged with a diagnosis of severe tonsillitis and an extended prescription of antibiotics.

Two days later Yusuf was given further antibiotics by his GP for a possible chest infection, but his family became so concerned they called an ambulance and insisted the paramedics take him to Sheffield Children’s Hospital rather than Rotherham.

Yusuf was admitted to the intensive care unit on 21 November but developed multi-organ failure and suffered several cardiac arrests which he did not survive.

The initial report into his death said there was only one doctor in the paediatric UECC on 15 November and, after midnight, that medic was responsible for covering adults and children.

But it added that the doctor who saw Yusuf was an experienced UECC doctor who would not have needed to refer to a paediatrician to admit him.

Mr Ahmed said the family had been told the hospital was "short-staffed" and that various health professionals had tried to "blame each other".

He added: "There are continuous problems. There's not enough beds, not enough doctors, not enough resources. Somebody shouldn't have to suffer for someone else's errors.

"We're quite certain things are getting thoroughly looked at now.

"There's a problem and it needs to be looked at but if you never come to admit that there's a problem then unfortunately it's going to keep leading to fatalities."

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