EMERGENCY staff at Winchester’s Royal Hampshire County hospital probably missed the fact that a retired gardener had broken his neck, an inquest has concluded.

Coroner Grahame Short said yesterday that when Eric Longman tripped over on the pavement returning home from buying a paper on the morning of April 20 last year “on the balance of probability, this caused a fracture”.

The court heard how the 86-year-old was taken to the Royal Hampshire County Hospital by ambulance, where he then lay on a trolley in a corridor for about 45 minutes waiting for a bed.

Neighbour and former nurse Nicola Lansdowne, who accompanied Mr Longman to hospital, said: “He started to complain of a headache.

“He was putting hand up to his head because the blood was still trickling down his face into his eye.

“I didn’t leave his side. We saw a doctor a good deal later, there were very few staff.”

Mrs Lansdowne described the consultant’s examination as “brief”.

Dr Louisa Chan told the court how she diagnosed that Mr Longman had suffered a “minor head injury”, which is why she didn’t order either an X-ray or a CT scan.

She said she closely felt the top of his spine and asked him to move his head and limbs in different directions to repeatedly test for any neck injuries, all of which he told her he could do without feeling any pain.

“He was fine. The clinical examination of his neck was completely normal,” she said.

“Even if we had X-rayed him, if he had a hairline fracture we may not have seen it.

“I prescribed him some codeine but he didn’t receive it.”

Mr Longman spent the next month not leaving his home in Hursley Road, Chandlers Ford, except for two GP visits to complain of persistent headaches, for which he took paracetamol.

Neither of these doctors concluded that he had a broken neck.

Mrs Lansdowne said her neighbour’s condition deteriorated over that time and he stopped changing his clothes: “When I took him meals he was starting not to be able to hold the plate straight, he didn’t have the strength in his limbs.”

On the morning of May 28, her 11-year-old daughter Melissa found Mr Longman slumped in their drive: “He was a heap of clothes. I thought he was dead he was so cold,” she said.

“He had crawled along the drive and just laid there in the rain.”

After an ambulance returned Mr Longman to hospital, Accident and Emergency consultant Dr Jaydeep Chitnis discovered that his neck was broken just below the base of the skull and had shunted apart by nearly a centimetre, so that it was pressing onto his spinal cord.

A team of spinal experts concluded that the fracture had “possibly” happened some time previously, that surgery was too dangerous and Mr Longman was too old and frail to endure traction for a break which probably wouldn’t heal itself.

Mr Longman, who was head gardener at Southampton University for 30 years, was described as “very calm” when told there was nothing that could be done to treat him and he could die within hours, or days.

In the end he survived for seven weeks in hospital, before contracting a terminal bout of pneumonia.

Recording a narrative verdict that nothing could have been done to save Mr Longman’s life once the break had been discovered, coroner Grahame Short said: “Given the evidence I cannot be sure that the fall on April 20 caused the fracture of his vertebrae.

“Although, having said that, I believe it’s quite possible that it was the cause of the fracture.

“I have heard no evidence of any other incident or fall which might have explained the fracture to this vertebrae.”

Speaking after the inquest, Mr Longman’s younger sister Gladys White, 83, said her brother lived for his gardening and also loved attending steam rallies.

“He lived a lonely life but was very kind,” she said.

“His nurse at the hospital told him he was the only patient who thanked her for what she had done.”