Four-year-old boy died after becoming so dehydrated in hospital he had to suck on wet wipes

A disgraced children’s hospital has admitted 22 failures by medics following the death of a four-year-old boy.

Sean Turner was born with his heart on the right side of his body and died from a brain haemorrhage in March 2012, six weeks after undergoing corrective surgery.

During a 2014 inquest, Sean’s parents accused Bristol Children’s Hospital nurses of leaving their son so dehydrated that they found him sucking wet wipes for moisture.

Now a far-reaching inquiry by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman said the lad’s aftercare at Bristol Children’s Hospital amounted to “service failure”.

Nine experts ruled University Hospital Bristol Foundation Trust was guilty of maladministration for failing to be open with Sean’s parents.

It also ruled Sean, from Warminster, Wiltshire, was “not given the best possible chance of survival”, noting 22 failures by nurses and doctors.

The trust has now been ordered to write “an open and honest acknowledgement of the failings identified” in the report and “an apology of the impact”.

The inquiry did not find that Sean would definitely have survived without the trust’s failings.

But it added: “Nevertheless, the distress Mr and Mrs Turner have suffered, and continue to suffer, will undoubtedly be compounded by the uncertainty - however small - of never knowing whether Sean might have survived if everything that should have been done for him, had been done.”

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