\n<\/p>\n
A woman who was found dead alongside her \u201centirely dependent\u201d teenage daughter had called 999 saying she \u201ccould not move\u201d almost four months before her body was found but no ambulance was sent to her, an inquest has heard.<\/p>\n
Alphonsine Djiako Leuga, 47, suffered from sickle cell anaemia and died from pneumonia, and her 18-year-old daughter, Loraine Choulla, had learning difficulties and Down\u2019s syndrome, relying on her mother for food and hydration.<\/p>\n
Nottingham coroner\u2019s court heard that Leuga called 999 on 2 February last year saying she was cold and could not move, and gave details of her address before hanging up.<\/p>\n
The hearing was told that during the call Leuga groaned, requested an ambulance, and said: \u201cI need help to my daughter\u201d and: \u201cI\u2019m in the bed, I feel cold and can\u2019t move\u201d before cutting off the line.<\/p>\n
She also gave details of her address in Radford, Nottingham, where her body and that of her daughter were found on 21 May last year, almost four months later.<\/p>\n
Giving evidence at an inquest into their deaths, East Midlands ambulance service\u2019s head of patient safety, Susan Jevons, said the call should have been referred to the control room dispatch officers.<\/p>\n
She said attempts had been made to call Leuga back and that \u201cthe call should have been left for an ambulance to attend once we had got the address, which we had.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ambulance didn\u2019t go to the address because the emergency medical adviser, thinking it was an abandoned call, closed the call down. So it wasn\u2019t visible to anybody within the emergency operations centre.\u201d<\/p>\n
The coroner said she would have to consider the possibility that sending an ambulance to the address \u201cmight have been the difference between life or death\u201d for Choulla.<\/p>\n
Jevons said there was a \u201cmissed opportunity for an ambulance to attend Alphonsine when she requested one\u201d.<\/p>\n
The inquest was told that Leuga was admitted to hospital for a blood transfusion in late January last year as she was critically ill with very low iron levels, and she was given a \u201cpragmatic\u201d discharge due to her daughter\u2019s care needs.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton told the hearing that the mother and daughter were both likely to have been dead for \u201cweeks to months\u201d before they were found, rather than for days or hours. He said he could not rule out the possibility that Leuga had died on the day of the 999 call.<\/p>\n Hamilton said Leuga\u2019s cause of death was pneumonia of uncertain cause, while her daughter\u2019s cause of death could not be established.<\/p>\n Asked to comment on the possibility that Choulla\u2019s death may have been because of dehydration or malnutrition, Hamilton answered: \u201cThere is nothing in my findings that say any of that is incorrect.\u201d<\/p>\n The inquest continues and is expected to last five days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A woman who was found dead alongside her \u201centirely dependent\u201d teenage daughter had called 999 saying she \u201ccould not move\u201d almost four months before her body was found but no ambulance was sent to her, an inquest has heard. Alphonsine Djiako Leuga, 47, suffered from sickle cell anaemia and died from pneumonia, and her 18-year-old<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[2249,634,4835,1274,855,4611,5065,1399],"class_list":{"0":"post-11624","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-bodies","9":"tag-call","10":"tag-daughter","11":"tag-emergency","12":"tag-months","13":"tag-mother","14":"tag-nottingham","15":"tag-services"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}