An inquest has determined that an Australian woman’s death from a caffeine overdose back in 2021 could have been prevented. And the reason it wasn’t will infuriate you!
In April of that year, a 32-year-old woman named Christina Lackmann called emergency services in Melbourne, reporting she was feeling frightening symptoms. According to News.com.au, Lackmann made the initial call to 000 at 7:49 p.m. local time. A coroner’s report viewed by the outlet noted Christina complained on the phone of feeling “sick, numb all over her body, and dizzy.”
Initially, the symptoms relayed on the phone call were determined to be non-urgent. That meant, per local protocol, Christina’s issue was transferred to an Ambulance Victoria Referral Service Triage Practitioner (RSTP). However, all the RSTPs at the time were busy — and the transfer call wasn’t immediately successful.
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About a half hour after Christina initially made her call for help, the RSTP was finally reached. They tried to contact Christina to check on her condition, making multiple phone calls and sending text messages to Christina “with some frequency” over the next hour without her answering, according to the report:
“An RSTP attempted to call Christina back 26 minutes after the 000 call was ended. The RSTP called three times, but there was no answer. At 8:17 pm, the RSTP sent a text message to Christina’s mobile advising that Ambulance Victoria was trying to call her. AV communications staff continued to attempt call-backs with some frequency, but there was no answer. In all, a total of 14 call-backs were attempted.”
OMG. If somebody called emergency services asking for medical help, and they don’t answer when you call back 14 times (!), why not just send an ambulance over to check on them?!?!?! Maybe it means something is seriously wrong, don’t you think? Why wasn’t there a system to transfer her to high priority?
But that didn’t happen. From there, paramedics were twice assigned to go to the biomedical sciences student’s home to deliver care — first at 9:14 p.m. about 90 minutes after she originally made the phone call for help, and then again at 1:46 a.m. However, neither paramedic made it. They both ended up being diverted to higher priority cases on what turned out to be a particularly busy night for first responders in Melbourne.
At 2:23 a.m. — nearly seven full hours after Christina had originally placed the call — an ambulance finally arrived at Lackmann’s home. She didn’t answer, of course. But they were able to gain entry via a balcony with help from a neighbor. Inside, they found Christina dead on her bathroom floor, with her dog barking nearby.
So, so sad.
Caffeine tablets were discovered in Lackmann’s apartment after her death. An autopsy determined she also had an extremely high concentration of caffeine in her blood and stomach, per 9News.
Coroner Catherine Fitzgerald determined in the inquest report released this week that Christina could have survived if she had been seen earlier in the night by emergency services. Fitzgerald’s report further concluded that Lackmann could have been saved another way — if her initial call had just been transferred to a proper health practitioner for more immediate oversight. Just a doctor taking a phone call, asking her a couple questions. JFC.
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A professor assisting in the inquest, Narendra Gunja, noted that Lackmann had not mentioned ingesting caffeine pills on the initial call, nor had the dispatcher properly inquired about it. The deceased woman likely would have received treatment earlier if she’d been questioned about medications she’d taken on the call, Gunja hypothesized. The inquest doc stated:
“This would likely have led to appropriate management with the use of antidote therapy and haemodialysis. If these management strategies were followed, Gunja considered it likely that Christina would have survived, even with a large caffeine overdose.”
Even knowing that, Gunja’s analysis wasn’t able to pinpoint an exact time in those seven hours in which Christina’s death could have been prevented:
“However, in the absence of information about the time Christina ingested the caffeine, or the length of time between ingestion and the making of the [emergency] call, Gunja was not able to pinpoint a specific time at which Christina’s death was still preventable.”
Still… waiting seven hours for an ambulance. And in a huge urban center, no less. Seriously? That’s just not acceptable.
Sending all our love to Christina’s loved ones — who must be fuming learning she could have been saved. Ugh.
[Image via WENN/Beate Lackmann/Instagram]
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