A 26-YEAR-OLD publishing executive died after spending eight months on an NHS waiting list for a scan that would have enabled doctors to treat her condition.

Sarah Clarke, an epileptic, was referred last August for the scan but suffered a fatal seizure in March despite a plea in February by her consultant to speed up the assessment.

Her mother Gaynor discovered her daughter’s body when she went into her bedroom to ask if she wanted breakfast. “Sarah’s death just wasn’t necessary,” she said. “I just think she could have had a long and fulfilling life if the NHS services she needed were there.”

Clarke’s death is likely to provoke a political row over the “hidden” waits that thousands of patients face for potentially life-saving diagnostic tests. It will also fuel the growing controversy over NHS targets which critics say are distorting doctors’ clinical priorities.

Her consultant, Professor Ley Sander, of University College London’s Institute of Neurology and Britain’s leading epilepsy expert, said that four of his young patients, including Clarke, had died this year while waiting for scans or operations. He said the government’s targets meant epilepsy was less of a priority in the NHS even though some 400,000 Britons suffered from the condition.

This weekend Michael Howard, the Tory leader, said it was an appalling tragedy: “In the fourth richest country in the world, people shouldn’t have to settle for this. Doctors should be able to exercise their own clinical judgment. They shouldn’t be second-guessed by bureaucrats and managers.”

A spokesman for John Reid, the health secretary, acknowledged there were “unacceptable” waits for diagnostic tests but added: “That’s why we’ve bought more MRI scanners, fought within our own party to use the private sector and are now pledging a guaranteed maximum wait from seeing your GP to treatment of 18 weeks.”

Clarke, of St Albans, Hertfordshire, had suffered from epilepsy since she was 15 but for 11 years the condition remained stable. Last summer, however, the frequency of her fits began to increase.

In August, Sander decided she needed an MRI brain scan to determine the type and range of drugs needed to tackle her deteriorating condition. Control of seizures is crucial in epileptics because the higher the number of fits, the greater the risk of death.

The problem is particularly acute in young adults like Clarke who can suffer “sudden unexpected deaths” immediately after a seizure. At least 700 young adults die from this phenomenon, akin to cot death, every year, according to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

The seizure that led to her death in the early hours of March 4 was the third that week. Her mother said: “If she had got the scan there would have been a chance of finding the right drugs and at least we would have felt we’d done all we could for her.”

Clarke, whose family subsequently contacted both the government and the Tories to highlight her plight, was waiting for a bed at the Chalfont Centre, Buckinghamshire, where her two-day assessment and MRI scan would have taken place.Sander said average waits for scans at this centre and another in London was at least eight months, which meant that, potentially, hundreds of young people were dying unnecessarily every year.

The government has proposed the creation of 100 epilepsy centres to solve the problem but Sander said no money had been forthcoming.

• A senior consultant in one of the country’s leading hospitals is standing for parliament as an independent because of Labour’s “damaging” target-obsessed culture in the NHS.

  In a wide-ranging attack on Tony Blair’s policy of NHS targets, Keith Greene, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Plymouth’s Derriford hospital, said the health service had got worse under Labour. He said to meet targets “lowly bureaucrats are deciding which patients get seen first”.

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