Good morning. Martha Mills, a sunny girl who dreamed of being a writer or an engineer, should have celebrated her 16th birthday last week. Instead, two years after a bike accident ended in her avoidable death in hospital, her name was read out by the health secretary in parliament as he told MPs the government was considering a new NHS policy in her memory.
Her mum, Merope Mills, editor of the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, usually works behind the scenes, commissioning and editing the words of others. But after Martha died in harrowing circumstances after a series of “unforgivable hospital errors”, Merope and her husband, Paul Laity, decided to go public with their grief, channelling it into preventing others from being placed in the same terrible position.
