When Karen Osenton walked into her father's ward at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford last summer, she saw a man deteriorating rapidly. David Osenton, a retired engineer in his early 70s who had been fit and healthy before his admission, was by then thin, jaundiced and barely able to lift his head. He had spent six days in the cardiac ward, and his condition appeared to worsen each day.
Karen kept noticing a poster above his bed explaining a patient’s right to request a second opinion under 'Martha’s Rule'. On the sixth day, she decided to act.
