Their Mum Died After Failures in Hospital Care. Their Dad Was Beaten to Death. Now the Pullar Family Are Fighting Back

By LUCY ADAMS

FOR MOST people the loss of a parent would be devastating, but to hear, in two separate courts over two days, how your mother died because of failures in hospital care and your father was assaulted and died, has left the Pullar family almost inconsolable.

This month they stood in court as two teenagers were imprisoned for assaulting their father. He was so badly injured he died the next day. The sentencing came just a day after an inquiry found that their mother had died as a result of failures in the care she received in hospital.

Alexander Pullar, 63, a retired college lecturer from Cumbernauld, was beaten to death as he left his local pub in March – just 14 months after his diabetic wife, Moira, 62, was given a fatal dose of insulin at Monklands Hospital in Airdrie.

“It has been a nightmare, ” says Laura Pullar, one of their three daughters. “When we tell people the story it almost feels as if we are making it up. They had been together for 44 years. After my mother died my father fell apart. He was crying all the time but was determined to get justice for her and to ensure it wouldn’t happen to anyone else.”

The fatal accident inquiry ruled that Moira Pullar died after being given 10 times the normal dose of insulin in Monklands Hospital. Sheriff Robert Dickson said poor handwriting by one nurse on the patient’s chart was misread by the nurse who administered the fatal dose.

Her three daughters – Moira, 42, Laura, 39, and Natalie, 38 – and son Alex have now revealed that they are planning to sue the hospital.

Cameron Fyfe, their lawyer, has written to Monklands to ask them for a settlement. If that is not agreed they will sue for damages in the Court of Session. They stand to win tens of thousands of pounds but that is unlikely to have much impact on the combination of grief and anger they are feeling.

“It is not about the money but it is about revealing what happened and making sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else, ” says Laura Pullar. “We were all horrified to discover the people responsible are still working in the hospital. When my family got to the hospital for visiting hours they thought she was dead but they had to call the nurses twice before they came over. That was particularly difficult for my father.

“The fact my mother had to linger there for days and get pneumonia added to the trauma. She was a very private person and dignified lady and would not have wanted any of that. She had said she would neverwant to undergo a postmortem and the fact they had to do one haunts us.”

Moira and Alexander Pullar met in the winter of 1959. She was a trainee nurse on the nightshift at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow and he was leaving a dance there. By chance, when he contracted appendicitis weeks later he was sent to her ward.

They married in November the following year. She gave up nursing, partly because she had developed TB and she wanted to have a family.

They moved from Glasgow to Cumbernauld where he was an engineering lecturer and she raised their four children. More recently she spent much of her time with her five grandchildren, who are aged between seven and 14.

“We were a close family but my mother held us all together, ” says Laura Pullar, who is also nurse. “We are all struggling to come to terms with what happened.

“I had flown back from America where I had been working as a nurse and packed up everything to come home and look after her. I spent one day with her and then the next day she was given the insulin overdose. After that they made the error of not checking her blood sugar levels before lunch – when there was a window of opportunity to reverse the situation. After that it was too late and when I went in I knew straight away that she was brain damaged.”

The inquiry at Airdrie Sheriff Court heard she died on January 17, 2004, from bronchial pneumonia brought on by heart failure and brain damage due to the insulin overdose.

In his determination, Sheriff Dickson said: “There was a failure in the system for recording and prescribing insulin within ward 14. There was also a defect in the system as to who was to be responsible for the taking of blood sugar levels for patients.

“These two defects in the system of working contributed to the factors that led to her death.”

The inquiry heard Mrs Pullar was suffering from kidney failure and needed her insulin dosage kept to a low level. Her consultant recommended her insulin be administered in two doses of four units each day. But nurse Kathleen Walker misread the handwriting on her chart and instead gave a fatal dose of 40.

The weekend before the inquiry began, the family were told their application for legal aid had been rejected. Laura Pullar, partly because of her own experience in nursing, was asked if she wanted to represent the family during the inquiry.

“We couldn’t understand why we were denied legal aid, ” she says. “Even Sheriff Dickson said he couldn’t understand it. He was stunned. It was really short notice. I didn’t have any of the records but I had to stand up and ask questions. Sheriff Dickson was great but it was tough, particularly when I had to question Catherine Walker, but I am glad we had the opportunity to ask what happened.”

In a statement, NHS Lanarkshire said that action had already been taken to address many of the issues raised in the inquiry ruling.

Weeks after Moira Pullar died, her husband suffered a heart attack.Then, in March, just after leaving his local pub in Cumbernauld, he was so badly beaten he died the following day.

On December 9 two teenagers were imprisoned for a total of six years and four months for their part in what the judge described as a “violent and cowardly” attack. They hit the retired college lecturerwith a piece of wood and punched and kicked his head and body before they robbed him of a jacket, cash, a newspaper, a bottle of vodka and his asthma inhaler.

A 15-year-old boy charged with his murderwas deemed insane and unfit for trial at the High Court in Glasgow last month, but will appear in January.

“We couldn’t believe they got such short sentences, ” says Laura Pullar. “We were refused legal aid and yet these boys got it. They had the top QCs money can buy. My father was so charismatic and energetic. He used to camp every weekend and go long-distance running when he was younger.

“Our only hope now is that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”