Mind & body, in brief

Alder Hey, a children's hospital in Liverpool, has admitted 24 failures led to a toddler's death. [1]

Eleanor Aldred-Owen was 21 months old when she died there on 2 October 2023. [1]

A coroner, who rules on how a person died, found that neglect played a part. [1]

The trust that runs Alder Hey said her death "should not have happened". [1]

Hospitals in England are moving to one national early warning score for children. [3]

Eleanor's parents say the trust's changes must be used properly and kept under review. [1]

Such a score gives points for a child's routine checks, then adds them into one number. [2]

A higher score is meant to bring a faster, more senior response. [2]

Safety teams add layers: a warning score, a rapid response team, intensive-care staff on wards. [2]

A response team depends on experienced staff being free to make urgent decisions. [2]

Her father says the trust first called it a breach of duty, not gross neglect. [1]

A 2022 review says studies of children's warning scores rarely test whether each part works. [2]

Alder Hey, a children's hospital in Liverpool, has now admitted that 24 failures in its care led to the death of 21-month-old Eleanor Aldred-Owen, after a long push by her parents. [1]

X-ray staff now have a clear route to raise urgent findings at once, the step that failed for Eleanor. [1]

One national early warning score replaces each hospital's own version, so the numbers mean the same everywhere. [3]

They say they live with unbearable guilt and are irreversibly changed, though the trust, not they, failed her. [1]

Whether children's early warning scores, now going national in England, cut deaths on wards.

A 2022 review found studies rarely test whether each part of the score works as intended. [2][3]

Alder Hey now has a clear way for X-ray staff to raise urgent findings straight away, and two checks after surgery there carry Eleanor Aldred-Owen's name.

Families whose children died on a children's ward in Kettering, England, want a public inquiry. [4]

They began their campaign on Friday with a candlelit vigil in the town. [4]

Louise Longster's daughter Chloe, 13, died of pneumonia and sepsis there in 2022. [4]

A coroner found neglect contributed, and many chances to save her were missed. [4]

Nicola Stanton's daughter Jorgie died on the same ward in 2016, just before turning two. [4]

Her inquest found 5 medical failures, including missing that she was dehydrated. [4]

Inspectors rated the ward inadequate in 2023 and requires improvement in 2024. [4]

The families say the hospital keeps promising that lessons will be learnt, and nothing changes. [4]

Medical law's duty of candour says a hospital must tell a family promptly after harm. [4]

The only penalty so far was a 1,250-pound fine for phoning Chloe's family late. [4]

The hospital's boss says he will listen; the UK health department had not yet replied. [4]

Why one mistake rarely kills a patient, but several in a row can

A hospital puts several checks between a sick child and harm

Each check misses some problems: a score added up wrong, an X-ray not passed on

Most days a later check catches what an earlier one missed

Harm gets through when every check misses the same problem at the same time

So safety work fixes the checks, not only the person who slipped

Eleanor's death needed many checks to miss the same collapsed lung. That is why the investigation counted 24 failures, not one.

Three of the checks that missed Eleanor's collapsed lung. The investigation found the score alone, added up right, would have brought an earlier review.

Jorgie's inquest found five separate failures, from a steroid drip removed to dehydration nobody noticed, each a check that let the problem through.

The doctor's advice, the medicine leaflet and medical training all missed the same risk; the woman's own EpiPen was the check that held.

A doctor on the rota who does not turn up is a check that exists on paper only, which is what the attendance system was brought in to find.

A check only works if someone is free to act on it.

The radiographer, the doctor, the nurse adding up a score and the parents by the bed each saw one part of Eleanor's care.

Families of children who died at Kettering General Hospital and at a Sussex hospital are still pushing for the same kind of answers, through a call for a public inquiry and a lawsuit. [4][5]

The words 'lessons will be learnt' sound as if the learning has already happened, and the Kettering families say it has not. [4]

Whether the UK government will order a public inquiry into Kettering's Skylark ward.

The families launched their campaign on Friday, and the UK health department had not replied when the BBC asked. [4]

Olivia Trupiano's parents are suing the NHS trust where she died at five days old. [5]

She was born by emergency caesarean at 34 weeks, in September 2024. [5]

That was at the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, in England. [5]

Before the birth, her mother Kimberley Newark was told her severe pain was trapped wind. [5]

In fact she was bleeding inside: an artery to her spleen had burst. [5]

Olivia's brain got too little oxygen around her birth, and she died on 19 September. [5]

An inquest in October found nothing in her care likely to have caused her death. [5]

The coroner said her mother's condition had not shown itself in the usual way. [5]

The same trust's maternity care is under an independent review led by midwife Donna Ockenden. [5]

Whether earlier treatment of the bleeding would have saved Olivia is still not settled. [5]

A health board in north Wales is consulting on closing 3 urgent care centres. [6]

The board, Betsi Cadwaladr, runs the NHS's hospitals and services in the area. [6]

The centres are at hospitals in Holyhead, Tremadog and Bangor. [6]

Nurses, family doctors and physiotherapists there treat urgent problems on the same day. [6]

They opened in 2022 to ease pressure on family doctors and A&E. [6]

The board blames money pressures and trouble hiring staff. [6]

The board spent 9 years under special measures over care quality and patient safety. [6]

In health planning, these centres exist to take urgent cases away from GPs and A&E. [6]

Objectors say patients would crowd into GP surgeries and A&E instead. [6]

Holyhead's hospital already lost its 4-bed hospice unit in 2025. [6]

If the plan is approved, the centres would shut by 31 March 2027. [6]

If the three urgent care centres close by March 2027, objectors say patients will crowd GP surgeries and A&E instead. [6]

The health department of Balochistan, a province of Pakistan, sacked 72 government doctors on Saturday. [7]

They were dismissed for long absences from work, under an AI-based attendance system. [7]

The province brought in the system to make medical staff turn up regularly. [7]

In all, 200 health department staff have now been dismissed, and 800 more face action. [7]

Notices have gone to 11,000 employees asking them to explain their absences. [7]

Officials say 410 million rupees has been cut from staff pay over absence. [7]

The health minister, Bakht Muhammad Kakar, says the doctors ignored repeated notices to return. [7]

He says the aim is good health care at people's doorsteps. [7]

The report does not say how accurate the AI system is, or how doctors can appeal. [7]

A doctor on the rota who does not turn up is a check that exists on paper only, which is what the attendance system was brought in to find.

Sacking 72 doctors and cutting 410 million rupees of pay lets it show action on doctors who do not turn up. [7]

They lost government jobs at once under a system whose checks have not been published. [7]

How Balochistan's AI attendance system decides a doctor was absent, and how a sacked doctor can appeal.

The official notice gives the dismissals and pay cuts but says nothing about how the system checks or how decisions are reviewed. [7]

A woman nearly died of an allergic reaction to an antibiotic in her partner's semen. [8]

He had taken amoxicillin, a common penicillin antibiotic, 6 hours earlier for a sinus infection. [8]

She was known to react to penicillins, so he asked his doctor first. [8]

The doctor told him she would not be at risk. [8]

5 minutes after sex, she went into anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction. [8]

She used her EpiPen, an adrenaline injector, and left hospital six hours later. [8]

About 1 in 100 people are allergic to penicillins, but anaphylaxis from them is extremely rare. [8]

The doctors who studied her case want it on amoxicillin's leaflet and taught in medical training. [8]

Antibiotics reach the glands that make most of the fluid in semen through the blood. [8]

Staff who treated her seemed not to know this could happen, she says. [8]

The UK medicines regulator, the MHRA, will decide whether the leaflet should change. [8]

The doctor's advice, the medicine leaflet and medical training all missed the same risk; the woman's own EpiPen was the check that held.

Whether amoxicillin's leaflet will warn about passing the drug on through sex.

The doctors who studied the case have sent it to the MHRA, the UK medicines regulator, which had not commented. [8]

The woman who reacted to amoxicillin in her partner's semen survived: she used her EpiPen, paramedics gave more adrenaline, and she left hospital six hours later.

A hospital in Chongqing, China, tracked the infections patients caught inside it for 39 months. [9]

It is a 1,100-bed district hospital, outside the big university hospital networks. [9]

Across 256,993 admissions, 1,054 patients caught 1,240 infections in the hospital. [9]

That is 0.48 infections per 100 admissions, with no rise in any season. [9]

The commonest germ, in 19.4% of samples, was a bacterium called Acinetobacter baumannii. [9]

Carbapenem antibiotics failed against 92% of those germs, and 98.5% in intensive care. [9]

Breathing machines, being bedbound, tubes into big veins and stroke were common among resistant cases. [9]

Drug-resistant germs cause a growing share of deaths from infections caught in hospital. [9]

Data scientists call it leakage: the test held repeat patients and facts known only later. [9]

The team found an earlier accuracy figure of 0.91 came from that mistake. [9]

The corrected score for predicting drug-resistant infection is 0.74 to 0.75. [9]

The team has shared the hospital's data openly, so others can check it. [9]

The Chongqing team published its hospital's data openly and corrected an inflated accuracy figure, so others can test their own methods on it. [9]

Carbapenem antibiotics failed against 98.5% of the commonest germ there, leaving doctors fewer drugs that work. [9]

The US fertility rate fell 1% in 2025, to its lowest level on record. [10]

That rate counts births for every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44: 53.2 in 2025. [10]

The figures come from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the CDC. [10]

Births fell from 3,628,934 in 2024 to 3,612,012 in 2025. [10]

Rates fell to record lows for every age group from 10 to 29. [10]

For women aged 20 to 24, the rate fell from 55.8 to 52.3. [10]

For women aged 30 to 34, it rose from 93.7 to 96.3. [10]

An Atlanta Federal Reserve study found Gen Z women much less likely to want children. [11]

The US median age reached 39.4 in 2025, and some states are losing people. [11]

Demographers watch the rate, not just the count, because the number of women changes too. [10]

One mother told NPR the cost of raising a child convinced her one was enough. [11]

More mothers began pregnancy check-ups in the first three months: 76.3%, up from 75.5%. [10]

Why fewer women in their twenties in the US are having babies.

A Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta study points to costs, careers and changing priorities, but the birth figures alone cannot separate choice from money. [11][10]

Home life predicted depression in young US teenagers better than their genes did, a study found. [12]

It used 9,797 children from the ABCD study, which follows US children as they grow. [12]

Researchers used each child's life at 9 to 11 to predict symptoms at 11 to 13. [12]

12 factors together explained 12.3% of the differences in symptoms. [12]

The strongest were a parent's depression, seeing violence at home, sleep and dieting. [12]

The home score reached 0.69 on an accuracy scale; the gene score reached 0.64. [12]

Using both together did best, at 0.71. [12]

Geneticists add up many small gene differences into one number, a polygenic risk score. [12]

Sleep and dieting can change, so the authors call them possible targets for prevention. [12]

The authors say the score must still be tested on other groups of children. [12]

Two days of group therapy eased depression symptoms a week later, a small Romanian trial found. [13]

Of 61 adults, 31 were picked at random for therapy and 30 to wait. [13]

The therapy builds on CBT, which works on how thoughts, feelings and actions link up. [13]

It adds why closeness mattered to our ancestors, to ease self-blame. [13]

Groups of five to seven met in Bucharest for two 8-hour days. [13]

That is 16 hours, about as much as a normal course of one-to-one CBT. [13]

After a week, the therapy group scored 7.5 points better on a 0 to 42 scale. [13]

After three months the gap shrank to 3.1 points, small enough to be chance. [13]

If the result holds up, the short length could matter in clinics, the lead researcher says. [13]

A waiting-list comparison cannot show it beats existing therapies, the researchers note. [13]

One therapist ran every session and knew who got therapy; the method's author co-wrote the study. [13]

The researchers call for a bigger trial against standard group CBT. [13]

Whether two days of group therapy helps depression for longer than a week.

The gain shrank to 3.1 points at three months, and the trial had 61 people, one therapist and no comparison with other therapies. [13]

An immune signal may reshape growing lungs in Down syndrome, lab work suggests. [14]

Down syndrome comes from trisomy 21: three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two. [14]

Lung problems are a main cause of illness and death in children with Down syndrome. [14]

Type I interferon, an immune signal, is overactive in many of their tissues. [14]

Researchers added interferon to developing human lung tissue in the lab. [14]

It reproduced most of the gene activity changes seen in trisomy 21 lungs. [14]

The team says the signal is needed for these lung changes, and enough to cause them. [14]

In a growing lung, the supporting tissue signals the lining how to form; interferon disrupts that. [14]

That gives researchers a way to test possible treatments in the lab. [14]

The work used lab tissue, not children, so it shows a cause in the lab only. [14]

Whether the interferon finding in trisomy 21 lung tissue holds in children's bodies.

The experiments used developing lung tissue in a lab, not children. [14]

England's children's minister, Josh MacAlister, visited Denmark this week to study its children's homes. [15]

The visit is part of a Department for Education review of England's children's homes. [15]

Last year 669 children in England lived in illegal, unregistered children's homes. [15]

Councils paid more than 125 million pounds to keep them there. [15]

Spending on children's homes rose 96% in five years, to over 3.1 billion pounds in 2023-24. [15]

English homes make teenagers leave at 18; the Danish home lets them stay to 23. [15]

In the UK, about 53% of children's home staff have worked there three years or less. [15]

The review is led by Emmanuel Akpan-Inwang, whose trust runs a children's home in Sutton. [15]

Many children in English homes report being cut off from family and friends. [15]

Staff at one top Danish home are trained in social pedagogy: psychology, child development and ethics. [15]

In England, 83% of children's home places are run privately, some at profits above 20%. [15]

The UK government can cap those profits by law but has not yet used the power. [15]

MacAlister says he is "really persuaded" by ending the fixed leaving age of 18. [15]

Wales will ban profit-making firms from children's social care by 2030. [15]