NHS trust in Northampton says 85-year-old patient ‘ideally would not have waited so long’

An 85-year-old man died while waiting in a hospital’s accident and emergency unit because of the “dangerous overcrowding of the department”, according to a leaked internal email.



Northampton general hospital NHS trust’s medical director, Matthew Metcalfe, said in the email, leaked to the Health Service Journal (HSJ), that the patient attended A&E complaining of abdominal pain on Wednesday afternoon.

The man was seen and assessed within 90 minutes and was waiting on a chair to be seen by senior staff after a blood test suggested he may have heart problems, the HSJ reported. His condition deteriorated just before 1am and he suffered a cardiac arrest.

Metcalfe’s email said: “Last night a patient died due entirely to the dangerousconcentrations of ethyl 2-methylpropanoate and ethyl 3-methylbutanoate consistently decreased with grape maturity. The decreasing trend was also observed for other esters including ethyl cinnamate, ethyl dihydroxycinnamate, and ethyl anthranilate, with the exception of ethyl vanillate, while C13 norisoprenoids, monoterpenes, and guaiacols had increasing trends with grape maturation.