Yusuf Mahmud Nazir: Health Secretary speaks to family of boy who died after being sent home from A&E
The family of a five-year-old boy who died after he was sent home from A&E have said the Health Secretary is taking their concerns over his death "very, very seriously".
Yusuf Mahmud Nazir died at Sheffield Children's Hospital on November 23, 2022, eight days after he was seen at Rotherham Hospital and sent home with antibiotics.
Yusuf's family met Health Secretary Wes Streeting in London on Wednesday to discuss the case after a report published in July included a range of recommendations for the NHS.
Speaking outside the Department for Health and Social Care, Yusuf's uncle, Zaheer Ahmed said: "It went very well. We spoke about the recommendations and how they're going to be implementing them.
"It's looking like Wes Streeting is taking it very, very seriously and the team's taking it very seriously to implement the laws and changes to make things better for everybody.
"It's important that this is taken very seriously and these concerns are addressed nationally."
A lawyer for the family previously told a pre-inquest review hearing that the family believed "a number of significant systems failures" in Sheffield and Rotherham that went beyond "individual nurses and doctors doing the wrong thing" could have played a role in Yusuf's death.
The youngster's family have always said they were told "there are no beds and not enough doctors" in the emergency department at Rotherham, and that Yusuf should have been admitted and given intravenous antibiotics.
The report into his care published in July said in its conclusions: "Our primary finding is that the parental concerns, particularly the mother's instinct that her child was unwell, were repeatedly not addressed across services.
"A reliance on clinical metrics over caregiver insight caused distress for the family.
"This led to a lack of shared decision-making and there was limited evidence of collaborative discussions with Yusuf's family around clinical decisions, leading to a sense of exclusion and reduced trust in care plans."
Yusuf, who had asthma, was taken to a GP with a sore throat and feeling unwell on November 15, 2022.
He was prescribed antibiotics by an advanced nurse practitioner.
Later that evening, his parents took him to Rotherham Hospital’s urgent and emergency care centre, where he was seen in the early hours of the morning after a six-hour wait.
He was discharged with a diagnosis of severe tonsillitis and an extended prescription of antibiotics.
Two days later Yusuf was given further antibiotics by his GP for a possible chest infection, but his family became so concerned they called an ambulance and insisted the paramedics take him to Sheffield Children's Hospital rather than Rotherham.
Yusuf was admitted to the intensive care unit on November 21 but developed multi-organ failure and suffered several cardiac arrests which he did not survive.
A full inquest into his death is due to start on April 13 next year.
Mr Ahmed, who was joined at the meeting by Yusuf's mother, Soniya Ahmed, and lawyer Anna Thwaites, said: "We believe that the inquest will come out with a lot more truth about what happened to Yusuf.
"We wanted to make sure that parents' voices are heard, it's very important that parents get their voices heard."