Eight and a half years since Averil Hart died, her father asks when well-meaning policies will be turned into action
It is more than eight years since Averil Hart died after being found passed out in her university room, but the words left in her diary are etched in her father’s mind. “She said: ‘dear God please help me’ and that was four or five days before she collapsed,” says Nic Hart. “It sums up what many young people desperately need. They need help. Here we are eight-and-a-half years on and what has changed?”
Averil, who was diagnosed with anorexia aged 15, was taken to Norfolk and Norwich University hospital at 19 in a “severely malnourished” state but received no nutritional or psychiatric support during her four-day admission, according to an inquest into her death. She was then urgently transferred to Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge.
