The couple moved in after just six months of dating, enjoying nearly 50 years of marriage together as Carol switched from being a legal secretary into teaching.<\/p>\n
But Carol’s mental health declined in later years, diagnosed with recurrent depressive disorder.<\/p>\n
Although this was kept in check by medication, her mental health became affected by her physical health which also began to deteriorate, most notably following a trip to Iceland where she was diagnosed with pneumonia and type 2 diabetes.<\/p>\n
Ralph – from Buckhurst Hill – said he and the family sought psychiatric help for Carol, which was “not forthcoming”.<\/p>\n
She was admitted to hospital in June 2023 after taking an overdose, described as “a cry for help” by her husband.<\/p>\n
Eventually transferred to the St Margaret’s mental health unit in Epping, Carol stayed in hospital for the next five months, where she was resistant to treatment, becoming malnourished and dehydrated.<\/p>\n
Coupled with a lack of mobility, it created the perfect conditions for a blood clot to form in her lung, from which she died on 21 November 2023, aged 75.<\/p>\n
Ralph has criticised staff at the Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) and their attempts to resuscitate Carol, which he referred to as “shambolic”.<\/p>\n
“They were trying to resuscitate her with her being on her side, not on her back, they hadn’t switched the oxygen on,” he told the BBC.<\/p>\n
Staff tried to call 999 but did not know they had to press nine first to get an outside line, he explained.<\/p>\n
Ralph – who has called for better staff training and more transparency towards families – also said opportunities had been missed by the inquiry itself to try getting answers from the trust.<\/p>\n
“I was a bit frustrated because they weren’t being asked the hard questions,” he said, adding that the counsel to the inquiry “seems to adopt a sort of gentlemanly approach”.<\/p>\n
“Although there were barristers there representing the families, they couldn’t ask the questions direct, they had to be fed through the counsel to the inquiry.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The couple moved in after just six months of dating, enjoying nearly 50 years of marriage together as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[102,1906,6623,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-354869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354869","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=354869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}