Claire Fray is launching a medical negligence case four years after her father, Robert Fray, was left unattended in a chair at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for 16 hours and died days later. She says someone has to fight for him.
She is speaking now because the story of what happened to Robert, a 67-year-old grandfather of three, has become the basis of legal action against West Midlands Ambulance Service and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. Claire said her father was directed into the waiting room just after 1.15am, after developing signs of sepsis at a dialysis centre on April 4 2022.
The delay before he reached hospital was itself long enough to matter. Four calls were made before an ambulance arrived nearly six hours later. By then, Claire said, he was already sick and confusion had set in. She recalled getting him to the ambulance and seeing him look at her as if he was trying to say he loved her, but could not. The Frays called throughout the night for updates, each time told he was being taken care of.
What followed was worse. Robert was taken off the A&E waiting list at 4.39am because he had not responded when his name was called on the tannoy. A family member visited the department at 4pm the next day and was told he had left. In fact, he remained there until nearly 5pm the following day, when hospital staff found him in a chair. By then he had had a stroke.
Claire said she had to sit with him for five days and wait for him to pass away. She called him her best friend, the first person she spoke to in the morning and the last person she spoke to at night. That loss is now at the centre of a case that will ask whether the care he received caused or contributed to his death, a point the hospital trust and ambulance service have previously rejected.
The case also shines a hard light on one of the country's busiest emergency departments, where Claire said she could not stay with her father because of Covid restrictions at the time. What the legal process will determine is not whether Robert Fray was failed in a general sense, but whether those hours in the hospital waiting room were part of the chain that killed him.
