NHS criticised by Harley Street doctor for 'missing Jade Goody's cancer diagnosis'

A Harley Street consultant who treated Jade Goody has attacked the NHS for allegedly failing to spot her cancer earlier. Jade Goody died in her sleep at home on Mother's Day

Dr Ann Coxon, a doctor introduced to Goody last year was said to be "very angry" over an alleged failure to spot her illness earlier. Dr Coxon will speak in the E4 documentary Jade: As Seen On TV to be broadcast on Thursday night, according to Max Clifford, her publicist.

He said "Her doctor was very upset and very angry with the way the NHS looked after her and failed to diagnose the cancer that was growing for such a long time," he said. Goody, who died on Mother's Day earlier this year, was given a diagnosis of cervical cancer while taking part in the Indian version of Celebrity Big Brother last August.

The mother-of-two and former dental nurse, who was originally from Bermondsey, south London, first came into the public spotlight in 2002 when she appeared in the third series of the Channel 4 reality programme Big Brother.

In an interview in September, Goody said she had no plans to sue the NHS hospital she claimed was late in diagnosing her illness. "They (the hospital) should have actually spotted that there was something wrong a long time ago," she said. "I don't hate them, I'm not angry with them. Sorry - I don't hate them, I don't want to start suing them or stuff like that, because personally I don't think it's morally right to sue an NHS hospital. "All that's gonna do is take more money out of it and then more people are gonna suffer." She added: "I just think: it's not going to get my womb back, it's not going to get my health back. So what's the point?"

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Australia: NSW government hospital chaos as man lay dying

An inquiry has been launched into how a patient died while one of the nation's most experienced emergency doctors was in a nearby office and junior doctors attended a training session and were not available to help clear the crowded emergency department.

Distressed nurses at the Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, told the Herald they pleaded for registrars attending an educational talk to help them after the department reached capacity last week, with all beds full, 23 people waiting to be seen and 11 ambulances in the waiting bay. They say the doctors were not available, forcing them to beg the department head, Sally McCarthy, to put the hospital on "code yellow" to stop more ambulances arriving.

The nurses also claim Dr McCarthy, who is the president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, was not available and could not leave her office immediately. [No doubt she had a lot of important paperwork to do] The elderly man, thought to be dehydrated and suffering a severe infection, had arrived conscious at about 3.30pm last Wednesday, but given the busy state of the emergency department he had to wait "some time" in the bay and later became unresponsive, nurses said. He could not be resuscitated.

But the hospital's general manager, Andrew Bernard, yesterday disputed the nurses' claims, saying the man had left the bay and had undergone blood tests and cardiac monitoring before dying 2½ hours later. Dr McCarthy has refused to comment.

There is no suggestion the man would have survived if the department had not been busy, but nurses who contacted the Herald said they felt traumatised. "Several nurses contacted us and all were very distressed," the general secretary of the NSW Nurses Association, Brett Holmes, said yesterday.

An investigation into the incident has been ordered by the hospital. A spokesman for the Ambulance Service said no more than seven ambulances should have been at the hospital at the time.

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