Jessica Brady was a talented engineer at Airbus, involved in the design of satellites. <\/p>\n
Her mum, Andrea, told Radio 4’s Today programme that Jess was a very healthy young woman when the pandemic hit in 2020.<\/p>\n
But in July of that year, she didn’t feel right and contacted her GP practice repeatedly over the next five months about her symptoms.<\/p>\n
Over time they became “increasingly debilitating”, Andrea says.<\/p>\n
“She had unintentionally lost quite a lot of weight, had night sweats, chronic fatigue, a persistent cough and very enlarged lymph nodes.<\/p>\n
“But because of her age, it was obviously considered there wasn’t anything wrong.”<\/p>\n
Jess had contact with six different doctors at her GP surgery and three face-to-face consultations with a family doctor, but no referral to a specialist was made.<\/p>\n
“Her body was failing her,” says Andrea. <\/p>\n
“It was hard for Jess to advocate for herself. She was saying ‘What’s the point? Nothing will happen.'”<\/p>\n
When the family decided to arrange a private appointment and she was referred to a specialist, it was too late.<\/p>\n
Jess was given a terminal cancer diagnosis in November and died three weeks later – just days before Christmas 2020.<\/p>\n
The family hopes Jess’s Rule will help to increase awareness of the importance of GPs acting quickly for patients who are steadily deteriorating.<\/p>\n
“She wanted to make a difference,” Andrea says. <\/p>\n
“Jess knew her delayed diagnosis was instrumental in the fact she had no treatment options open to her, only palliative care.<\/p>\n
“She felt strongly she didn’t want this to happen to other people.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jessica Brady was a talented engineer at Airbus, involved in the design of satellites. Her mum, Andrea, told…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-154318","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}