THE mother of a baby who died from pneumonia while in the care of a profit-making company running Camden’s out-of-hours NHS service has launched a legal claim against one of its doctors. 

Linda Peanberg King has filed a writ in the High Court in a civil claim against Dr Kuljeet Takhar in a bid to discover answers to a series of questions about the tragedy in November 2012.

Dr Takhar was employed by Harmoni Plc and assessed seven-week-old Axel Peanberg-King in a clinic in the Whittington two days before he succumbed to bronco-pneumonia.

It followed repeated and increasingly desperate pleas for help from his mother to the Harmoni-run calls centre service, which was later revealed to have wrongly downgraded his condition from “urgent” to “routine”.

Speaking to the New Journal, Ms Peanberg-King said: “We are taking legal action in a bid to get answers about what happened, and to force them [Harmoni] to answer the allegations made over the care of Axel."

She added: “Obviously I also feel that it is very important that the privatisation of out-of-hours GPs and other health services remains in the debate. I still do not believe that profit-driven organisations belong in the NHS. Given that we read every day about how stretched A&E is, and how people should use alternative health services, such as out-of-hours GP services, that it is really important that people know that, according to my experience, they do not seem to know what constitutes a medical emergency. Axel displayed four out of four signs of a critically-ill baby, and they still sent me home.”

In February 2013, during an inquest in St Pancras Coroner’s Court, coroner Dr Shirley Radcliffe ruled Harmoni’s doctors had no case to answer over Axel’s death, and dismissed concerns that the service had been stretched to breaking point by the Government cuts to the NHS.

But in May that year the Care Quality Commission (CQC) investigation – after looking at records between November and January in 2012 – ruled in a scathing report that the company Harmoni "did not have enough qualified, skilled and experienced staff to meet people’s needs”. 

Harmoni had, in a statement to the New Journal weeks before the CQC report, insisted it “categorically refutes that our out-of-hours services in North Central London have been or are currently short-staffed, or that our North Central London service is unsafe”.

It was later revealed that the company had reported hundreds of target breaches to its NHS commissioners in 2012 after a raft of confidential files were leaked to the New Journal. 

Camden Council then launched a three-day public inquiry into the out-of-hours contract and Camden’s Commissioning Group also launched a review, which found Harmoni had resolved its issues with staffing and training, and was "robust".

Concerns were first raised by Dr Fred Kavalier, a long-standing Camden GP who became the medical director of Harmoni, after he quit the company in October 2010 warning in his resignation letter that a lack of manpower could lead to tragedy and that he did not want “responsibility for a service I consider to be unsafe”.

A spokesman for Harmoni said at the time: "We will never compromise clinical safety and will always maintain the safest possible rotas. Our commissioners are satisfied with the performance to date."

Harmoni Plc was contracted to run the service after a not-for-profit group of NHS doctors, Camidoc, went bust amid claims of under-funding following a round of NHS cuts. It later emerged that Camidoc had used doctors' pension pots to prop up the service, and some of its bosses were later given medical practice banning orders.

News of the legal case is likely to stoke a public meeting being held on Thursday in Camden Town Hall where campaigners will raise concerns about a new five-year contract which is expected to be awarded to the private company.

Ms Peanberg-King is represented by Islington-based human rights law firm Leigh Day & Co in her civil case. 

Dr Takhar, who was working in Harmoni’s clinic based in the Whittington Hospital, Highgate, has until mid-February to respond to the civil claim.