At around 8:00 am on 15 February 2022, after 13-year-old Joy Osundeko’s father had spent the night caring for her at their St Helens home, two carers arrived, only for one of the nurses to mistakenly turn off Joy’s life-critical ventilator for nearly six minutes, leaving her unresponsive and gasping for air until her mother discovered the error and her father manually resuscitated her—an incident that preceded a severe decline in her health and her tragic death four months later, ultimately leading to a civil settlement with the care provider, dropped criminal charges against the nurse, and a denied inquest due to a lack of forensic evidence.
The young girl, who had Down’s syndrome, pulmonary hypertension, and Moyamoya syndrome, required round-the-clock care via a tracheostomy-dependent ventilator at her family home in St Helens, Merseyside, under a bespoke care plan that mandated continuous, awake monitoring by staff trained to immediately use manual resuscitation equipment in the event of an emergency.
She tragically passed away four months later, on 13 June 2022, at the age of 14, after suffering a devastating stroke that caused brainstem death.
Following Joy’s tragic passing, her family launched legal action against Optima Health and Social Care Ltd, the provider that employed the nurse, which ultimately resulted in the company admitting a breach of duty for the ventilator incident while denying it caused her death, before both sides finally reached an out-of-court civil settlement.
Recalling that terrifying February morning when he found Joy completely “lifeless,” her father, Mayo, described how he rushed to her aid, grabbed the resuscitator bag, removed the ventilator from her trachea, and manually pumped life-saving oxygen into her lungs himself until she finally began breathing again.
As the nurse moved out of the way, Mayo desperately screamed his daughter’s name and continuously provided manual oxygen to Joy, who felt completely limp like a baby doll, until she finally started breathing again after almost a minute of resuscitation.
The nurse initially told the family that the life-critical ventilator had only been turned off for a few seconds, but they were left horrified when home CCTV footage later revealed the machine had actually been deactivated for nearly six minutes.
The care provider admitted a breach of duty but maintained that the life-critical ventilator was switched off “mistakenly” or “by accident”, a claim that left Joy’s parents profoundly frustrated as home CCTV footage revealed the nurse had completed a deliberate, 10-second multi-step shutdown sequence, yet because criminal charges were dropped and an inquest was denied, the nurse has never provided a definitive public explanation beyond repeatedly telling her father at the scene, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
