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Hello and welcome to the best of today podcast. If a loved one is in hospital, most of us

will have faith that they will receive the best possible care. And so we should, because

our system is made up of dedicated professionals. And the NHS ethos is one that we feel

vested in. It is, after all, there for us when we need it.

But things do go wrong, and when people die and those deaths are preventable, we need to learn from them.

And that means the professionals, the hospitals and the system.

What you're about to hear is a first-person account of one of those preventable deaths

and how a culture of hierarchies and silos played a role in it.

It's about the death of a child, a 13-year-old, in an NHS hospital,

of how patients and their families can be ignored even amid a mantra of being listened to.

The child's name is Martha Mills,

and on what would have been her 16th birthday, we talked to her mother. Martha died of sepsis after being on a pediatric ward for weeks.

Her mother, Merripe-Mills, is calling for a specific change across the NHS, a rule that would

give patients the right to request a clinical review in the event of a serious concern.

Merrippi talked to us to explain why this would have saved Martha and could save others.

She began in the summer of 2021 and the injury that put Martha into hospital.

We were cycling on a flat family-, friendly, car-free bike path in Wales. You couldn't

imagine a more, less dangerous activity. But Martha, Martha was cycling slowly, but she hit a patch of

sand because it was near a beach and the handlebars of her bike twisted as she fell

and she fell into the side of them and it went into her stomach and to her abdomen.

And at first we thought she was just winded because there wasn't any blood or cut.

...