A 58-year-old patient in a psychiatric ward in Cork was strangled to death after becoming entangled in a TV cable, an inquest heard yesterday.
Ann Collins had been a resident at Unit 8, St Stephen’s Hospital, Glanmire, since February 2009 and was suffering from severe dementia.
The ward is a high-dependency unit and Ms Collins was unable to feed, wash or dress herself and she frequently wandered about the ward in a restless manner.
Her speech was incoherent but staff giving evidence at the inquest said she had never tried to harm herself before. On January 31st this year, Ms Collins entered a dormitory room on the ward which houses eight beds and made her way to another patient’s corner cubicle. There she “became entangled in a TV cable”, according to Garda Enda O’Dwyer of Glanmire Garda station, though there were no witnesses to the event in court.
Her head had come to rest on the loop of a TV cable hanging a few feet above floor level from a TV on the wall. In her autopsy report, Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster said that Ms Collins knelt on the floor and put her head through the loop of the TV cable. The small amount of pressure placed on her neck as a result was enough to cause a heart attack, which in turn led to severe brain damage due to a lack of oxygen to the brain.
She attributed the cause of death as brain damage due to cardiac arrest due to ligature strangulation following suspension.