A grieving mother says her bad experiences with health care services has inspired her ongoing fight to prevent surgeries being closed down.

Christine Papalabropoulos, 61, of Harris Close, Wickford, has been campaigning for eight years since her daughter Tina died from aspiration pneumonia on January 30, 2009 at Basildon Hospital.

When the GP surgery South Essex Emergency Doctors’ Surgeries, known as Seeds, and Basildon Hospital failed to save her daughter, Mrs Papalabropoulos launched a private compensation claim. She got £3,000 compensation from the Health Service Ombudsman, £2,000 from the hospital trust and £1,000 from Seeds. She said: “I am trying to put the message out there why we need to save South Essex Medical Centre from closing because it will burden other surgeries.

“If it closes, it will mean neighbouring surgeries like Applewood and London Road will need to take up extra patients. MP Mark Francois said the Applewood Surgery can take up an extra 3,000 patients, but the surgery has not had a CQC inspection in six years. I am very concerned about this.”

On January 22, 2009, Mrs Papalabropoulos’s daughter was diagnosed with acute lower respiratory tract infection. The family GP told Tina and her husband, Christos, to continue giving her antibiotics.

She said: “It was a large surgery, I asked for a doctor to visit our daughter for the second time as she was deteriorating. He said to Christos we don’t need to come out, she would be well by Monday. We then called an out of hours doctor, he didn’t think it was necessary to come out either.”

On January 25, they called the out-of-service again came and sent Tina to Basildon Hospital. However, after waiting for two hours in the A&E, they told Mrs Papalabropoulos it was a minor chest infection, and it took another four hours to see a consultant. Doctors failed to transfer Tina to a high dependency unit and did not review her condition.

She added: “Large surgeries simply can’t cope with the grand scale of patients.”