A YOUNG woman left in a coma following a GP’s alleged misdiagnosis has told a national TV programme about her plight.

Christy Millar, 22, of Great Sutton, and her fiance Steven Boyer spoke out on ITV’s Doctor Who? Tonight documentary, shown at 8pm on Monday.

She was featured in the first 10 minutes of the report, which was looking at the state of and reaction to GP out-of-hours services across the UK.

Miss Millar, who was taken ill in March 2006 while studying in Liverpool, alleges she was misdiagnosed by out-of-hours GP service Urgent Care (UC) 24.

She fell ill on the Friday evening of a Bank Holiday weekend and called NHS Direct. She was in a lot of pain with stomach cramps, feeling like she’d been stabbed, and lay in agony in the shower for 50 minutes.

Miss Millar was first diagnosed over the phone as having constipation and was told to eat more fruit and veg. But the pain got worse and, that Sunday evening, she went to the out-of-hours clinic in Liverpool. She was sick in the surgery.

Mr Boyer, 28, told the show: “We were hoping he’d send Christy to hospital or do something.

“We did not realise how serious it was at this point. If we had, we’d have taken her to hospital. But we expected the doctor to be right.”

Miss Millar says she was diagnosed by the GP as having gastroenteritis. But 24 hours later, she went to A&E, where it was discovered her appendix had burst, her kidneys had failed and she had blood poisoning.

This led to her slipping into a coma, where she remained for six weeks.

When asked in the show why she didn’t go straight to A&E at the start, Miss Millar replied: “I trusted what the doctors and health professionals told us and had faith in the system and trusted they would do the right thing. They did not advise me to go to A&E.”

On investigating the matter, the General Medical Council concluded that the GP in question has “acted reasonably”, said the programme.

And a spokesman for UC24, which looks after 600,000 patients in Merseyside, told the show: “There is no suggestion any actions taken by us had any impact on Miss Millar’s case.”

Miss Millar is now on daily dialysis and needs a kidney transplant, for which Mr Boyer has offered one of his.

He added: “We want a bit of luck for Christy, she deserves it. She can have one of my kidneys and get some normality back and start her life again.”

For details of the programme, visit www.itv.com/tonight.