Defibrillator failed to save life of Donald Lawson (From York Press)

Defibrillator failed to save life of Donald Lawson

9:12am Thursday 9th September 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
•  

YORK’S coroner is to write to ambulance chiefs about their defibrillators after one failed to save the life of a heart patient.

The machine is still in use in ambulances in North Yorkshire two-and-a-half years after process worker Donald Lawson, 73, had a heart attack as an ambulance crew was treating him at his home in Welbourn Close, Tang Hall, an inquest heard.

When they tried to restart his heart with a defibrillator the machine failed to work. He died a few days later at York Hospital.

Asked if the machine’s failure had made a difference to Mr Lawson, accident and emergency consultant Dr Steven Crane said: “He would absolutely have survived if he was defibrillated immediately. I think he would have left hospital alive and well.”

The doctor also said: “The ambulance crew did absolutely the right treatment for him.”

Ambulance service equipment engineer David Robinson told the inquest routine maintenance to the machine had been overdue and after checks failed to find any fault with it, was still in use eight-and-a-half years after it was bought. The service’s accountants assessed defibrillators as “valueless” after seven years.

Coroner Donald Coverdale said he would write to Yorkshire Ambulance Service about “what I perceive to be a high risk policy of the use of equipment which has been proved defective but has remained in service and, following on from that, the continuing use of equipment when it could be described as past its useful life.”

He will also write about the use of equipment without authorisation from service engineers and when equipment was overdue maintenance. He recorded a verdict of death from natural causes.

The inquest heard Elizabeth Lawson dialled 999 on January 18, 2008, because her husband had chest pains. Paramedic Stephen Logan said he and a colleague were treating Mr Lawson in their ambulance outside his home when his heart stopped and they immediately tried to revive him. But the defibrillator failed with an error message he had never seen before or since.