Martha’s rule: What could the proposed changes mean for doctors?

Pressure is building for a formal system to allow patients or families the right to demand an urgent second opinion if a patient seems to be deteriorating, amid a campaign by the parents of a 13 year old girl who died from sepsis after their concerns were ignored. On 4 September England’s health and social care secretary, Steve Barclay, announced that the government was considering introducing “Martha’s rule,” requiring NHS hospitals to give quick access to a second clinical opinion in urgent cases.1

Martha Mills, daughter of Merope Mills and Paul Laity, died in 2021 a few days short of her 14th birthday, just after an August bank holiday weekend. She had been on a paediatric ward at King’s College Hospital in London, one of three national centres for the care of children with pancreatic trauma, after injuring her pancreas in a bicycle accident. She was showing signs of sepsis, and her parents raised this possibility with staff, but by the time she was transferred to paediatric intensive care days later it was too late. Merope Mills, editor of the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, and Laity, a senior editor at the London Review of Books, gave heartrending accounts that have struck a chord with a public starting to question …