The death of pregnant Indigenous woman Naomi Williams, who was told to take some paracetamol and sent home by emergency department staff at a regional hospital, was preventable, her distraught mother says.

Sharon Williams has demanded answers from the New South Wales health department about why her 27 year-old daughter was not kept for observation at Tumut hospital or given medical tests after attending the emergency department on New Years Day, six months pregnant and suffering from a severe headache.

“She was told to take some Panadol and sent home,” Williams wrote in a letter to the state’s health minister, Jillian Skinner.

“Within 24 hours she was dead. How could this happen?”

Williams told Guardian Australia that her daughter attended the hospital several times last year, including before her pregnancy, suffering from severe stomach pains. Each time she was given an IV drip and sent home, Williams said.

27 year-old Indigenous woman Naomi Williams. Photograph: courtesy of the Williams family

At one point, her daughter was referred by hospital staff to drug and alcohol and mental health workers. But Williams said that her daughter, apart from occasionally using marijuana to deal with the pain she was in, did not use other drugs and had no mental health issues.

She worked full-time as an adult disability support worker and continued to work even when she was in extreme pain, Williams said. In 2009, she won a Naidoc award in the ACT for her work with the foster care organisation Barnardos.

“There are problems in Tumut with people abusing prescription drugs, and people seeking out the drugs from hospitals, and I feel as though Naomi was tarred with the same brush,” Williams said.

“I honestly think that’s why they referred her to drug and mental health services. But she was a hard worker, the kind of person who hated to let anyone down. She didn’t have drug or mental health problems. But she was sick, and in pain.”

In frustration, Williams, who lives in the ACT, wrote to the head of nursing at Tumut and asked them to refer her daughter to a specialist in Canberra. Her daughter had had her gall-bladder removed several years earlier, and she believed that may have been the source of her stomach pain. But Williams was told that was a decision for her daughter’s doctor to make.

Williams and her daughter turned to Google trying to figure out what was wrong. In December, Naomi went to visit her mother in Canberra, and by this time she was pregnant. But Williams said her daughter looked unwell and was gaunt. She was admitted to a Canberra hospital suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum, a complication of pregnancy that is characterised by severe nausea and vomiting.

When she was discharged, Naomi decided to move to Canberra with her partner to be closer to her mother and to receive more comprehensive medical care.

“She was going to go back to Tumut and then move to Canberra after Christmas, in the new year,” Williams said.

“We were all going to be together again. I was going to retire once the baby came and be a grandmother, help out and do the babysitting. It was all planned.”

But Naomi never made it home. In the early hours of 1 January, she went to the emergency department of Tumut hospital complaining of a headache, by this time about 26 weeks pregnant.

She was discharged a short time later, at 2.30am, after being given paracetamol. When she woke up at home later that morning, Naomi complained to her partner that she was struggling to breathe and unable to walk properly.

Her partner called one of Naomi’s family members and asked them to drive her to the hospital. When the family member arrived, Naomi had rapidly worsened and an ambulance was called. She died en-route to Tumut hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest.

An autopsy found she died of meningococcal and septicaemia, a dangerous blood infection which can attack and affect organs including the heart. Williams wants to know why her daughter’s illness was not detected or tests carried out when she went to the hospital that morning, especially given she was pregnant.

“I firmly believe my daughter was treated with disrespect and very unprofessionally by certain members of the staff at Tumut hospital because she was a young, Aboriginal woman,” Williams wrote in her complaint to the health department.

“I don’t believe the same treatment would be received by a local white family. Tumut hospital seriously need to undertake training in basic human rights and Aboriginal cultural awareness.

“What caused her to have a massive heart attack and die so young? Was it neglect on behalf of doctors and staff? These are questions we require answers to.”



Williams said the hospital had contacted her last week to say their internal investigation into her daughter’s death was complete and to arrange a meeting. Williams has yet to meet with the hospital.



“I’m not ready to yet, and I just feel it’s too late now,” Williams said.

“She’s gone. I want to get some legal representation before I meet with them. What I want is for this to never happen again, to get this out there so that nursing staff and doctors can be educated to take these symptoms seriously if a patient is distressed and in pain and especially if they are pregnant. Enough is enough.”

Williams is still distraught about her daughter’s death. Naomi had been looking forward to becoming a mother, and had so many plans for her family, Williams said.

“She was a very caring person,” Williams said.

“She was very proud of her [Wiradjuri] culture and her identity. She was loved by everyone she worked with and by her community. We used to call her Miss Chatterbox because she was always talking to everyone, and she would have done anything for anyone.

“It’s so sad it has come to this.”

A spokeswoman for the Murrumbidgee local health district, which oversees Tumut hospital, said an internal investigation into Naomi’s death had been carried out. However, the result of this investigation would not be made public because it contained patient information, she said.

The spokeswoman said Naomi had received medical treatment when she attended hospital in the hours before her death, but did not say what that treatment involved.

“Naomi was assessed and treated in the emergency department,” she said. “Meningococcal meningitis can be very difficult to diagnose in the early stages of the disease as many symptoms are common to many mild viral illnesses.

All hospital procedures had been followed, the spokeswoman said, but lessons had been learned from Naomi’s death. The hospital now uses a critical care advisory service, which includes the use of telehealth cameras to link to specialist clinical advice at Wagga Wagga rural referral hospital.

Staff are also receiving training in the early identification and treatment of deteriorating patients, she said.

In a letter to the state MP for Wagga Wagga, Daryl Maguire, which Guardian Australia has seen, the chief executive of the Murrumbidgee local health district, Jill Ludford, wrote that she was “deeply saddened and concerned that Naomi’s family felt that she was not treated respect, and that they were not provided with adequate support or empathy following her death”.

“The local health district has mandated all staff to undertake training on Aboriginal Cultural Awareness and Closing the Gap,” Ludford wrote.

“Tumut hospital staff are progressing in this training.”

Dr Sandra Thompson is a public health physician who gave evidence into the inquest of Ms Dhu, an Indigenous woman who died in 2014 at Hedland Health Campus in WA from septicaemia and pneumonia, and who had been given paracetamol as the only treatment at an emergency department hours before she died.

While Thompson was not familiar with the details of Naomi’s case, she said that while doctors were under a lot of pressure, and could not diagnose perfectly every time, “it sounds like there was a short interval between her presenting at emergency and this disastrous outcome”.

“There has been a lot of community concern over a long period of time period of time about how Indigenous people get treated in emergency departments, and I personally know a number of people who have talked about the assumption that they are on drugs when they seek treatment and not being given proper consideration and attention. There may well be racism that’s operating in those circumstances.”

Naomi’s cousin, Adjunct Professor Dr Anita Heiss, with the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, at the University of Technology in Sydney, said she was angry that doctors had referred her cousin to drug and alcohol services instead of testing her for illnesses in the months before her death.

Naomi’s grandmother, who is now deceased, worked at Tumut hospital for more than 20 years and would have been “appalled” at the treatment of her granddaughter, Heiss said.

“It is such a tragedy,” Heiss said.

“Naomi was sick, and all she wanted was help. Someone has to be held responsible.”