The grieving parents of a 17-year-old Australian student who died after a severe allergic reaction are still searching for answers, years after he walked into hospital and never came home.
James Tsindos died after suffering anaphylaxis in May 2021, following the accidental consumption of cashews in a cheese sauce that came with a burrito bowl.
An inquest revealed the Brighton Grammar student had been given adrenaline by paramedics before arriving at Holmesglen Private Hospital in Moorabbin.
His father, Harry Tsindos, accompanied James to the hospital but was not allowed to stay due to COVID-19 protocols. “Yeah dad, I’m OK,” James told him before he left, promising to return after grabbing lunch.
What followed was a tragic sequence that James' parents say still doesn’t add up.
Soon after, the teen began to wheeze — a possible sign the adrenaline had worn off — and the inquest heard conflicting accounts about whether this was communicated clearly during the handover from ambulance staff to hospital workers.
James was categorized as a level three patient, meaning treatment should have occurred within 30 minutes.
Harry Tsindos said he received a phone call shortly after leaving the hospital: “Your son is very sick.”
Racing back to the hospital, he called again — and was told something he says he’ll never forget. “(A doctor said) his heart has stopped,” he recalled, choking back emotion. “I said, ‘Tell her what? Go in there and save my son’.”
James suffered a cardiac arrest, and a “code blue” was called. He was later transferred to the Alfred Hospital, where life support was withdrawn days later due to a brain injury.
In a haunting detail, a fellow patient named Zoran told 60 Minutes that he overheard James in his final moments. “I heard a person and they were saying ‘I can’t breathe’ … they said it many times,” Zoran said. “I can’t breathe, I’m gonna die.”
Within seconds, he heard a loud crash, which he believed was James collapsing. “Then it was just chaotic for maybe over an hour, trying to save the person,” Zoran said. “They were coming in my room, they were looking for things, they were running down the corridor … It was just chaotic.”]
Reflecting on the events, Harry Tsindos said, “I’m burying my son, and I don’t really know what happened. I’ve got a kid that walks into an ambulance, says to me, ‘Dad, I’m fine’, and I’m burying him, and I don’t know why.”
While he doesn’t know if he could’ve saved James, he said, “I wouldn’t have ignored” his son’s worsening condition.
“They need to own it. They need to come clean on it, for James’ sake, for my family’s sake, for the community’s sake, and for their own sake,” he said.
James' mother, Venetia, added, “I am in a position where I need to speak for James, because he can’t speak for himself, because they buried him in the ground. James is in the ground as we speak. He’s not here. That is not right.”
In a statement to 60 Minutes, a Healthscope spokesperson said: “We care for nearly 150,000 patients in our emergency departments each year, with the vast majority receiving timely and compassionate care.” The company acknowledged “there can be times, though they are rare, when our patient care and outcomes do not meet the standards we set for ourselves or the standard expected by the public.”
The operator added that it “expressed our deepest sympathies” to James’ family and is fully cooperating with the ongoing inquest.
Healthscope, which runs 38 hospitals across Australia, has also faced scrutiny following the death of two-year-old Joe Massa at Northern Beaches Hospital in Sydney. Joe’s parents claim he waited hours for a bed and was denied critical treatment before suffering a fatal cardiac arrest.
Joe’s father, Danny Massa, told 60 Minutes, “Not by any stretch of the imagination,” when asked if he thought Healthscope was equipped to run emergency departments.
NSW Premier Chris Minns met with Joe’s family in February and has since committed to banning all future public-private partnerships in acute hospitals.