Between Solitude and Machinery--Mark Hemmings' Last Days (March-April 2013)

Between Solitude and Machinery--Mark Hemmings' Last Days (March-April 2013)

On March 29, 2013, in the Mia area of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, central England. Mark Hemmings, a 41-year-old man with mental illness, suffered severe abdominal pain and called 999 emergency services for help. However, his complaint was judged to be "non-emergency" and no ambulance was dispatched. The decision was made using the NHS Triage Assistance Algorithm. This system, which mechanically traced options, was too cold to read the complex context of mental illness.

The doctor called again and he complained that he was about to lose consciousness. The doctor, however, instructed him to come to the clinic on his own. Having no car or means of transportation, he was unable to come to the clinic, and his record simply read, "did not come to the clinic. After that, no one checked to see if he was safe.

When care workers visited him on April 1, he had reached his limit. He was taken by ambulance to the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, but 30 minutes later he suffered a cardiac arrest and did not return home. The cause of death was obstruction of the pancreatic duct by gallstones - it is highly likely that he would have survived had he been rushed to the emergency room.

This case showed how much humanity can be lost when medicine becomes biased toward systems, efficiency, and algorithms. A solitary life, caught in a digital web, deemed an exception, dying without anyone noticing. It was not a flaw in the system, but the very limits of our imagination.