Woman with spina bifida may lose feet after wheelchair tips on cracked pavement in Doncaster

A woman who fell from her wheelchair after it overturned on a cracked pavement has been told she may need to have her feet amputated.

Jemma Cook, who has spina bifida, was tipped from her wheelchair near her home in Harworth, near Doncaster.

After initially believing she had not suffered any serious injury, Jemma went to hospital, where she was told both her feet were broken.

She is now waiting to find out if they will have to be removed.

"I'm angry about it because I've never had to have anything so serious done to myself," she said.

"It won't affect my life in the fact that I cant walk on them, but that's not the point. The point is I have always had my legs and I might now have to lose them."

Jemma, who was hoping to learn to drive, was being pushed by her mother, Angela, on Bawtry Road when the wheel of her chair caught on the edge of a crack.

Angela said: "Even though I had hold of the wheelchair, it tipped upside down with my daughter underneath it, the wheelchair on top. Both her legs went under the wheelchair."

Jemma said the family had been calling for repairs to the pavement for several years.

"You have got to try to get them to do something about it because we have fought this all my life and all we have got told is you can't do this for one person," she said.

Michael Erhardt, of Disability Rights UK, said: "Pavements are a critical piece of basic infrastructure across the country.

"Disabled people are much less likely to drive, we're more likely to walk and wheel, and pavements are a big, big part of that. Improving our pavements should really be a big priority for local authorities."

In a statement, Nottinghamshire County Council, which is responsible for maintaining roads in the area, said it was "extremely concerned" about the incident.

"As soon as we received the report, an urgent inspection of the location of the incident was arranged and no defects requiring a repair were found," the statement said.

"Our inspectors also recently undertook inspections of the footway on an unrelated area of Bawtry Road during which some surface damage was identified and repairs arranged. "

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