The family of a five-year-old boy who died after being sent home from A&E have hailed a coroner’s decision to open an inquest into his death.
Yusuf Mahmud Nazir died at Sheffield Children’s Hospital in November 2022, eight days after he was seen at Rotherham Hospital and sent home with antibiotics for a case of severe tonsillitis.
His family has been fighting for accountability ever since and has criticised two previous NHS reports into his death. The inquest announced on Thursday will help them get “closer and closer to the truth”, they say.
His uncle Zaheer Ahmed told media: “It will give us more answers about how Yusuf died, which is what we’re wanting.”
“It’s been a very long journey for us and we really appreciate the fact that the coroner has listened to us on our first approach and given us the inquest we want.”
Yusuf’s mother spoke to Sky last month following the release of the second report into his death. She described her anguish at watching her son “dying in front of her eyes” as she desperately sought help for him at two different hospitals.
She told Sky how she had rushed her son to Rotherham Hospital after he presented symptoms, where he was finally seen after a six-hour wait. Doctors then told her he couldn’t stay in the emergency ward due to a shortage of beds.
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When his condition continued to deteriorate, she called an ambulance to rush him to a specialist children’s hospital in Sheffield. The report released last month, the second by the NHS, noted that at the second hospital “a number of critical interventions were missed”.
Mrs Nazir had told Sky that if doctors had acted sooner, her son would still be alive.
“I carried Yusuf to the nurse, floppy with his eyes rolled back, struggling to breathe, myself to the nurse,” Soniya said in an exclusive interview with Sky last month.
“She said: ‘We’re too busy, we can’t get a doctor, you’ll have to wait.'”
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The family on Thursday welcomed the coroner’s decision after having raised grave concerns about the NHS’s two reports. The first NHS report had found no wrongdoing on behalf of Rotherham Hospital – which Yusuf’s family had criticised as a “whitewash”.
Sheffield’s Senior Coroner Tanyka Rawden has adjourned the inquest to a case management hearing on January 30 2026 and said a full hearing would take place after this.
Mr Ahmed said: “We don’t mind how long it takes as long as everything gets looked at properly and thoroughly and we get the answers that we need.
“We don’t want it to be rushed. We don’t want any opportunities to be missed.”
He added that Yusuf’s birthday had been on Wednesday, the day before the inquest was announced. “He would have been eight years old today.”
