Mid Staffordshire lawyers say they withheld report from coroner to protect trust

Two former senior members of the legal team at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust have defended their failure to disclose to the local coroner a damning consultant’s report on the death of a patient who, it later emerged, had died from an undiagnosed ruptured spleen.

The accident and emergency consultant Ivan Phair concluded in his report that 20 year old John Moore-Robinson’s death might have been avoided and could have been caused by a junior doctor’s negligence in failing to carry out a proper examination. Mr Moore-Robinson, who had been injured in a mountain bike accident, was seen at Stafford Hospital in April 2006 but was sent home and died a day later in another hospital. …