Clarissa Street was 24 years old and had just graduated in sociology from the University of Manchester.
One night in August 2024, she fainted and her boyfriend called an ambulance. At the Royal Oldham Hospital in the United Kingdom, a paramedic said she was “exaggerating” and having a panic attack. The triage nurse, Michelle Neale, put an oxygen mask on her so that she could “regulate her breathing” — but never connected it to any source of oxygen.
Clarissa spent more than an hour in a hospital corridor with her pulse racing and her oxygen saturation falling, while the mask was doing absolutely nothing. A more experienced nurse simply decided to observe her without giving her any further attention just because she was “young”. Hours later, in another area of the hospital, her body collapsed. She died from a pulmonary embolism, the same condition that the staff had decided not to take seriously. The nurse herself admitted in court that she did not know why she had given her an unconnected mask, and acknowledged that she should not have done so.