Grieving mum faces £115,000 claim

A London heart hospital which neglected a teenage girl is pursuing her grieving mother for £115,000 in legal costs after she lost a court action against it.

Josephine Ocloo faces ruin for her decision to sue the Royal Brompton hospital where her 17-year-old daughter Krista died after a heart operation.

The university lecturer from Kilburn took legal action because she believed successive inquiries to failed to answer her concerns over her daughter's death in 1996.

Krista died from heart failure in her sleep. She was found by her twin sister Kelly, now 23, after she had gone to bed complaining of feeling unwell.

Mrs Ocloo, 53, who had been seeking £20,000 in damages, said today: "It is devastating. When Krista died I was a heartbroken mother who just dared to ask why my daughter died. Five years later, I have been dragged through two inquiries which failed to turn up anything. Then I took them to court and it was proved they had been negligent. I would never have gone to court if the hospital admitted it had been negligent in the first place."

In his summing up of the case, heard in December, Mr Justice Leveson criticised the Royal Brompton for not giving Krista an appointment between January 1996 - when she developed shortness of breath, chest pain and was admitted for tests - and December 1996 when the promising sixth-former died. Tests later showed Krista had serious problems. Despite his finding of negligence, however, he ruled that the failure to give Krista a follow-up appointment had probably not caused her death.

"Never mind the minor matter of justice," said Mrs Ocloo. "It has been emotionally crippling, now it will cripple me financially. If I lost my home, I don't know what me and my daughter would do."

Mrs Ocloo co-ordinated the Brompton Parents' Group which successfully pushed for a two-part inquiry into paediatric cardiac services at the Royal Brompton Hospital and Harefield heart hospital. The inquiry made 120 recommendations.

She decided to pursue the case of her daughter's death in the High Court because the hospital continued to deny negligence. She said it was her only way of winning an official acknowledgement of the seriousness of the omissions in Krista's case.

Because the action failed, the NHS Litigation Authority is seeking to reclaim its costs. The £115,000 figure was disclosed in a letter to Mrs Ocloo's solicitors. A spokesman for the authority said: "She lost and would have been advised by her barrister and her solicitor what the consequences of that would be."

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