Tragic Sam's friends fight hospital superbug
Newcastle College student Sam Fallon died last May after being struck down with MRSA at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire. With the first anniversary of Sam's death approaching, her friends and family want to raise awareness of the superbug, as Phil Corrigan found out.
SAM Fallon was only 17 years old when she died of MRSA last year, leaving her loved ones shocked that a young life could be cut short so suddenly.
She had suffered from an auto-immune liver condition since the age of 12, but was killed by the notorious hospital-acquired infection in just nine days.
Sam, from Campbell Road, Stoke, was a popular media student at Newcastle College, where her death is still keenly felt by her many friends.
Jade Hampton, who had known Sam for seven years, is hoping to mark the first anniversary of her death by holding a charity fun run.
Jade, of Lodge Road, Penkhull, said: "Sam had been ill her whole life and so she was always going into hospital. She was getting better, but then she contracted MRSA. It could have been prevented.
"We haven't got a venue for the run yet, but we've had a good response from Sam's friends. Sam was very popular at the college."
The 17-year-old asked Derek Butler, chairman of MRSA Action UK, for help in organising the event, and he volunteered to come into the college and speak to the students about MRSA and other superbugs.
Hundreds of students attended a series of lectures yesterday, joined by Sam's mum Sue Fallon.
Mr Butler said: "We were honoured to help Jade, and we suggested we could come to the college and give a presentation on bacteria to the students.
"We're telling them about what hazards to look for and what they can do about them, like washing surfaces regularly and keeping things clean."
MRSA, or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a strain of bacteria that has developed resistance to antibiotics.
While healthy people can carry the bacteria without any ill effects, if they do not wash their hands when they visit a hospital they can pass it on to patients.
MRSA Action UK, which was set up by a group of people who had all lost loved ones to the superbug, aims to raise awareness of MRSA and influence government policy.
Improvements in screening and cleanliness have helped to cut the infection rate at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, with only 29 cases of MRSA reported from April to December last year.
But Sue Fallon believes that awareness needs to be raised to prevent other people suffering the same fate as her daughter.
Ms Fallon, aged 43, from Clayton, said: "It's good they're having these lectures at the college, because a lot of people might think it's only old people that can die of MRSA, when really it can be anyone.
"My other daughter Alex is 13, and she didn't know what MRSA was until Sam had got it. She'd never heard of it."
Jade hopes the fun run will take place in June.
2 Comments
by Jade, Penkhull
Sunday, March 22 2009, 6:07PM
“Anyone that would like to take part in the Fund Run please feel free to contact me on sammieMRSA@hotmail.co.uk. with your name and contact email address so that we can send you details nearer the time.
I hope that the MRSA Action UK awareness campaign makes a difference, I am hoping to help in anyway possible to make sure that noone has to go through what Sammie's family, her friends and myself went through when we lost her to something that could have been avoided.
Thanks”
by Malcolm, Alsager
Wednesday, March 18 2009, 11:55AM
“The optimism of people is astounding. A love one dies and someone fronts up and organises a fun run. It could only happen in Britain; if this were the States the (private) hospital would be covered in writs faster than you could say negligence. It is too easy a target, the Health Service. Treating everything from face lifts to heart surgery there is quite a lot of room for misadventure. Yesterday we heard of the problems that Stafford had gone through, if I had the time and the assurance of anonymity, she was an old lady and old people die, but apart from that there is the issue of dignity. More hospitals than we care to mention that treat our loved ones would not have seemed out of place in the Crimea under Florence Nightingale.
What was astonishing yesterday was the fact that there had to be an inspection (by a private company) to assess the conditions within the Stafford Hospital. This means that of all the thousands of people that work in that Trust not one of them had the courage or the freedom to stump-up the truth and it was only when another paid for at our expense to do what should be and act of self-discipline organisation 'noticed' the failings that anything was done.
What has happened in the NHS to plain old vocation, care and concern for the patients? We see nurses as saintly creatures but how much are they now trading on the culture of their former selves, before so many of them got degrees and found that the mundane functions of ministering to their charges became too onerous. Yesterday the ¿Daily Telegraph¿ issued figures for the tons of food that the health system throws away; considering that the Government was this far from instigating a search of everyone's bins to find what food we were throwing away it is odd that they are blind to their own inefficiency.
In a system that has expanded too quickly to cater for our burgeoning population it is all too easy to allow standards to fall in the hope of some future formulation. The system is stretched and catching up is too difficult because of the entry level criteria for nurses in particular. If a degree is the desirable level for a nurse then we have three years whereby they are unproductive; then, upon commencing the job, they will have a desire to put their training into practice, I do not suppose for one moment that feeding patients, turning them in their beds and pottying them is challenge that a qualified doctor would attempt so why a qualified nurse?
This is the awful system as much as my interpretation of how the practitioners behave. Everyone has expectations but no one detailed to do the basics, it's as though outcomes were purely clinical which of course they are not. Not only do we pay the over-the-table amount that we do in tax to maintain this service but many of the Trusts extract millions from their casual trade in outpatients for parking too. The question is not money it is ethos.
Anyone can read a temperature chart or read clinical notes but few apparently have the stomach to see to their charge¿s ablutions. Open wards with constant toing a froing apparently did not solicit any queries from the multitude, doctors included, as to how so many people died and the conditions they died in. In this instance there is a scandal of MRSA which despite all the advances in medical science seems to be intractable and accepted as such.
This girl obviously had her own, on-going, problems but no doubt she and her family knew instinctively almost how to care for her, what precautions to take. She lived to the age of seventeen under that kindly and intimate regime, it took a hospital to watch over her demise.
Obviously too much is being expected from the system and the Government's ¿stick and carrot¿ approach of rewarding hospitals is a carte blanch for the practice of deceit and the encouragement of half-baked management operation. There is not only too few staff there are too many customers, though that may stem from ”