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Call for safety measures after plunge death
A CITY doctor is calling for action over a multi-storey car park after a woman plunged 100ft to her death in front of horrified onlookers.
A CITY doctor is calling for action over a multi-storey car park after a woman plunged 100ft to her death in front of horrified onlookers.The woman, who has not been named, is the seventh person to have died in the past 22 years, after falling from one of the Queensgate car parks.
Emergency services were called to the Clare car park, in Westgate, at about 1.40pm yesterday, after reports the woman had fallen from the roof top. Police closed Westgate at its junction with Bourges Boulevard while the woman was treated by paramedics.
The Anglia 2 air ambulance was deployed, with doctors from the emergency medical charity Magpas on board, and landed opposite the Brewery Tap, where Dr Claire Hayes-Bradley and paramedic Colin Charlton attempted to save the woman.
A spokesman from Magpas said: "The woman had sustained fatal injuries and our team were unable to save her."
A man who didn't want to be named added: "I was in the Queensgate centre when I heard people talking about what had happened and we came out to see police cars and the helicopter. "
There have been more than 18 suicide attempts from the multi-storey car parks at Queensgate since they opened in 1982, and there have also been deaths over the years at the Northminster car park, close to the city market.
Today, Dr Koneru Prasad, a GP at the Westwood Clinic, in Wicken Way, called for railings or barriers to be put up along the roof tops in a bid to prevent the death toll rising.
He said: "Railings or barriers could just give that extra couple of minutes for people who are contemplating suicide to change their minds, allow someone to see them and talk them down or make it more difficult.
"Although it is difficult to prevent a suicide as it is very often the case these people are determined to take their own life, we still shouldn't be making it easier for them."
Today's call comes just two years after Dr Ranjit Mazumdar, who lost a patient in a fatal leap of desperation back in 2005, also called for barriers to be put in place at the multi-storey Queensgate car parks.
Dr Prasad added: "I would like to know whether there has been a risk assessment of the building and why there has been nothing put in place sooner. It is a public place and anyone can have access to the building, and people don't just have to be suicidal to jump, they may be absent-minded."
No one was available at Queensgate to comment today. Police today said there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death and a file had been passed to the coroner.
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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