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Family handout<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\nA teenager left alone at a mental health hospital should have been under constant supervision when she self-harmed and later died, an inquest heard.<\/p>\n Ruth Szymankiewicz was being cared for by a member of staff on his first shift at Huntercombe Hospital, near Maidenhead, on 12 February 2022.<\/p>\n The 14-year-old, from Salisbury, was unaccompanied for about 15 minutes and left alone to walk around the hospital and to her room, assistant coroner Ian Wade KC said.<\/p>\n Shortly afterwards, she was found unconscious and died at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford two days later. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ruth was cared for on Thames ward, a psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) at the hospital, from October 2021. She had been diagnosed with an eating disorder.<\/p>\n The hospital, which has since shut down, was rated inadequate<\/a> and later requires improvement<\/a> in two separate inspections by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2021.<\/p>\n Her parents Kate and Mark said Ruth loved animals and reading and had a “fiery, determined” personality and a “huge heart”.<\/p>\n They said she “was and still is deeply loved” and that her death “shattered us”.<\/p>\n The jury heard she had climbed Kilimanjaro aged 11. She had lived for a time in Tanzania with her mother and father, a GP and surgeon respectively, and her two sisters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ruth was initially cared for on the children’s ward at Salisbury Hospital but was hurt when a nasogastric tube fed contents into a lung rather than her stomach in September 2021. She was transferred to Southampton for further care. <\/p>\n Days afterwards, her parents said they were told Ruth would be moved to Huntercombe Hospital, which they found had been poorly rated and was a two-hour drive away from their home.<\/p>\n Dr Szymankiewicz said the process for why Ruth needed to be moved to the hospital and onto a PICU was “opaque” and that the system was “incredibly difficult to navigate”.<\/p>\n “We wish we had fought harder. We had no idea how awful it would be,” she said in a statement. <\/p>\n She said there was “never any sense that staff thought it was important to communicate” with them about Ruth’s care.<\/p>\n Serious problems, such as Ruth drinking cleaning fluid and having black eyes, were not raised with them, Dr Szymankiewicz added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It is thought the hospital worker, who was subsequently found to have false papers, returned to Ghana, where it is thought he was from. <\/p>\n The inquest, at Buckinghamshire Coroner’s Court in Beaconsfield, is expected to last for about two weeks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n‘Incredibly difficult to navigate’<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n