Annah was told to take her daughter home from hospital. She died the next day

Pippa White was an old soul, “the perfect daughter”.

She loved dressing up in flowing dresses and putting her hair into ringlets. She adored her dolls, holidaying in the family caravan and her five siblings. If there was an argument, she was the one calming it down.

“She was the peacekeeper of the family, which sounds crazy because she was the two-year-old,” said her mother, Annah White. “She had that old-world glamour about her … and it feels like a life sentence for our family because we can’t get her back.”

Pippa White had a fever and was vomiting when Annah took her to the emergency department at Cowra Hospital one Sunday afternoon in June 2022.

When a nurse took her heart rate, it was 171 beats per minute, considered in the “red zone” for potential sepsis.

But a nurse advised Annah to take Pippa home as the hospital was busy dealing with a critically ill patient, White told an inquest last year.

When she continued to get sicker, Annah took Pippa back to the emergency department, where doctors decided she should be transferred to the larger hospital at Orange. Her condition continued to rapidly decline and an emergency ambulance team was called to take her to Westmead Children’s.

Pippa never left Orange. She suffered two cardiac arrests and died shortly after midday on June 13, 2022, two months shy of her third birthday.

NSW deputy coroner Joan Baptie will on Monday resume her inquiry into the care Pippa received in the days and hours leading up to her death – and whether her death was preventable.

Sepsis occurs when the body’s immune response to an infection causes damage to its own organs and tissues. A locum paediatrician involved in the toddler’s treatment at Orange Hospital previously told the coroner Pippa would “almost certainly” have survived if she had received antibiotics 12 to 18 hours earlier.

Parents Annah and Brock, who will both give statements in court on Monday, hope the inquest will build momentum for system-wide reforms after a series of high-profile failures in NSW public hospitals.

Brock and Annah White at their home near Newcastle ahead of this week’s inquest. Credit: Dean Sewell

Annah White said recent tragedies, including the deaths of two-year-old Joe Massa and newborn Harper Atkinson at Sydney’s Northern Beaches Hospital, showed families continued to be let down by the state’s health system, and she could not grieve her daughter until things changed.

“I would prefer to just be grieving my daughter, but I can’t grieve her because I know how bad the health system is,” White said. “Nothing really has changed, and there’s way more that needs to be done.”

After Joe Massa’s death in September, Health Minister Ryan Park vowed to overhaul REACH (Recognise, Engage, Act, Call, Help is on its way) protocols to make it easier for parents and carers to raise concerns about the condition of their loved ones in hospital.

White was aware of the REACH program through previous hospital visits with Pippa’s twin brother Leo, and she tried to escalate her concerns with emergency staff.

“Nothing was done about it,” White said. “No one’s taking their child to an emergency department for fun or for a holiday, and I just feel like no one’s taking parental concerns seriously.”

The inquest runs all week. It will hear from nurses who treated Pippa, spokespeople from NSW Health, and medical experts who conducted a review of her treatment.

White said she had read the expert’s report, and it validated many of her concerns about Pippa’s treatment.

Pippa White with parents Annah and Brock, sisters Tamika, Sophie, and Lucy, twin brother Leo, and brother Bodhi.

“There were moments for different people to intervene. It wasn’t one error, it was a chain of failures,” White said. “It’s weird to say that it was good to read that [report], but I knew she should have survived and that’s why I asked for this inquest.”

The White family and their supporters plan to attend every day of the inquest, wearing Pippa’s favourite colour, yellow.

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