THE sudden death of a Swarthmoor woman during a routine medical procedure was not caused by any doctors' blunder, an inquest concluded this week.

Dorothy May Edmonds, 72, began coughing blood before collapsing at Barrow's Furness General Hospital on February 2.

Junior doctor Rona Doff had begun a second attempt to drain puss from a chest infection using a needle when Mrs Edmonds complained that she was struggling to breath.

Dr Peter Jesudason, a locum registrar, took over the procedure he had been supervising and called the crash team but to no avail.

He told the inquest at Barrow Town Hall that he was "perplexed" by Mrs Edmonds's reaction to the chest drain.

A post-mortem examin-ation revealed that her chest infection had damaged the bronchial artery and blood had flooded her airway. Crucially, there was no bleeding around the needle marks of the chest drain, some six inches away.

An independent assess-ment of the case by Newcastle-based senior medical lecturer Dr S. Stenton concluded that Mrs Edmonds had possibly tensed her chest during the procedure, which had caused the artery to rupture because of its "precarious state", not because of anything the doctors had done.

Recording a verdict of death by natural causes, South Cumbria coroner Ian Smith said: "It's not because the doctors did anything wrong in putting a needle in the wrong place it's a natural disease process catching up with Mrs Edmonds in a very unexpected way."