The grandmother of a teenager who died after ambulance failings has told service bosses to "lie awake and think" because they "haven’t done enough" to address them.
Quinn Beadle was 17 when she died in December 2018 after ending her own life in woodland not far from her home in Shildon, County Durham.
Failings by a now-dismissed paramedic who attended the scene and the North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) in investigating his errors were exposed by a whistleblower in May 2022. A damning report into those failings was published last month.
Read more: Ambulance service got daughter's date of death wrong in apology letter to mum
Quinn’s grandmother, Marion Beadle, called on ambulance bosses to think how they would feel if their families had gone through the same ordeal at a meeting into the report today (Thursday, August 3).
“I hope you all lie awake wondering what if?’. She [Quinn] may never have recovered or in what state she may have recovered but my god if he [paramedic Gavin Wood] had done his job right we would know,” she said.
“How would you feel if it was your loved one?”
She told how Quinn wanted to be a paramedic before she died, adding: "She had a life ahead of her, she wanted to be a paramedic which is quite surreal considering that when a paramedic was supposed to come to her to help her, he did nothing.
“You have done something, but you haven’t done enough.”
Quinn's mother, Tracey Beadle stood up and placed photos of her beloved daughter and son Dyllon, who also ended his own life aged 21 just 10 months after his sister’s death, on the boardroom table.
Speaking after the meeting she renewed calls for a public inquiry, saying the meeting left her with more questions than answers.
Tracey told The Northern Echo: “I don’t feel that we have got any answers at all, in fact, if anything it’s left me with more questions. There was no point to that meeting whatsoever.
“It was like listening to politicians – it was all sort of buzz words.
“I didn’t get anything out of it like I thought we would. I hoped they would answer my questions directly, but they just went around the houses and the questions that they tried to answer directly they were lies.
“The only way that we will get the truth is if we have a public inquiry, not just for Quinn but for all the other families.
“Our next step is to call for a public inquiry. We don’t feel that the report that has just been done gives anybody any justice."
She added that she didn't believe that Dame Marianne Griffiths was the most appropriate person to conduct the report.
The meeting saw ambulance service bosses go through a series of 18 recommendations outlined in last month’s report by Dame Marianne before taking questions from the families of Quinn Beadle and Peter Coates.
Speaking to both families at the start of the meeting NEAS CEO Helen Ray said: “You deserved better from us as an organisation – personally, I cannot tell you how sorry I am.
“We have contributed hugely to your distress and that’s awful for us to have to carry with us but it is more awful for the families who have been bereaved.”
Ex-North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) paramedic Gavin Wood declared Quinn dead rather than trying to perform CPR. He was struck off by an employment tribunal panel earlier this year after it heard he failed to carry out standard procedures, such as clearing her airways, trying to find a femoral pulse or using a defibrillator on Quinn.
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The report by Dame Marianne published last month said: “Both this investigation and previous reports have found a number of failings in how the Trust should have responded to the incidents and then in their response to concerns about how failings were accepted and followed up.
“It is important that the Trust formally and publicly reiterates that there have been failings and restates its wholehearted apologies to the families concerned.”
Mr Coates died aged 62 in March 2019 after calling 999 when a power cut stopped his oxygen supply from working. One ambulance crew couldn’t get out of the depot as they did not know how to override automatic gates which had stopped working due to the same power outage and another crew had to refuel on the way to his home. When paramedics arrived, he was declared dead.
His daughter Kellie recently called for an inquest to be held into his death, which was initially recorded as natural causes, after new evidence emerged.
On Wednesday (August 2) it emerged an apology letter which was sent by Helen Ray to Quinn’s family in the post in May never arrived.
When it was eventually sent to Tracey the letter erroneously said Quinn had died five-and-a-half years ago, instead of four-and-a-half years ago.
Tracey added: “We want any families who feel they’ve been mistreated by the North East Ambulance Service to contact us.
"I don't know if the board knew that Dyllon took his own life 10 months after Quinn. He took his life three days after he read the first report into Quinn's death."
Tracey can be contacted via the Quinn’s Retreat website, the charity set up by Tracey and husband David in Quinn and Dyllon’s name to help those bereaved by suicide.
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