A primary school teacher died from an undiagnosed blood clot one day after being discharged from hospital, documents submitted to an inquest show. Dena Collins, 28, died at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Greenwich, London, on January 12 2023 from a heart attack caused by a blood clot, despite medics initially suspecting a clot may be behind her symptoms.
Ms Collins, from Eltham in south London, visited her local GP three days before her death complaining of pain in her left leg and had texted friends and family saying she suspected she had a blood clot after Googling her symptoms and potential side effects of antibiotics she was taking.
At her GP, she was diagnosed with muscular pain and given reassurance. On January 11, Ms Collins visited the Queen Elizabeth Hospital complaining of four days of leg pain, fever and diarrhoea. At the time, the nursery and reception teacher was using a crutch to walk because of the pain, limping and short of breath.
Despite the possibility of a blood clot being noted at triage and positive results from a D-dimer, a test used to identify clots, she was given a diagnosis of a possible ruptured cyst and told to return the next day for a scan. Ms Collins collapsed at her family home the next morning.
Her father gave her CPR before an ambulance arrived and took her back to the same hospital where she died a couple of hours later. A serious incident report, written by the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, found that, despite seeing four doctors at the hospital, an undiagnosed deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a blood clot in a large vein – most commonly in the leg, led to Ms Collins’ fatal heart attack.
