A CEILING that collapsed on elderly people in a care home, killing a woman and hurting several others, could have fallen at any moment, an inquest heard yesterday.

Mary Elizabeth Potter, 89, was sitting in the lounge of Maghull Group’s St Michael’s Manor care home, in Woolton Road, in Allerton, when a 10ft square section of ceiling crashed down on her and five other pensioners.

Staff performed cardiac massage and mouth-to-mouth among the falling debris and pulled her to safety in “chaotic scenes”, the inquest jury was told.

She was taken to the Royal Liverpool Hospital at about 9.30am on November 28 last year.

But she was not given a brain scan.

And in the early hours of the following morning, the stunned pensioner was sent back to the care home with some over-the-counter painkillers.

Her doctors, Dr Ulf Demnitz and Dr Sajid Mahmood, believed at the time that she had escaped from the “catastrophic ceiling collapse” almost unscathed.

Only a tiny cut on the back of her head told of the internal injuries she suffered. Care home staff sent her straight back by ambulance. This was her third return trip of the day, as Mrs Potter had a chest scan in hospital earlier in the day of the ceiling collapse. But, about two days later, after doctors became concerned at her apparently slow recovery, Mrs Potter was finally given a brain scan.

It revealed she had severe head injuries and a bleed on the brain.

Senior consultant Dr Geoffrey Phillips oversaw an inquiry into Mrs Potter’s treatment.

Yesterday he said: “It didn’t look good that she was sent back home and later died as a result of head injuries.

“But the decision not to carry out a CT scan was correct. There was nothing in the clinical evidence to suggest she had serious head injuries. And would it have made any difference? The answer is no.”

He said that internal head injuries among elderly patients, unlike younger victims, can often resolve themselves and said Mrs Potter would never have survived surgery.

The ceiling collapse that caused her death was blamed on dry and wet rot which riddled the ancient supports above the bay window at the side of the Grade II-listed building.

Philip Wright, a specialist engineer from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), said: “This could have happened at any time.”

But he said a massive leak in Mrs Potter’s room, directly above the lounge, some nine days before the tragedy, was the “straw that broke the camel’s back”.

Water cascaded from a broken tap in her bedroom, down into the lounge ceiling and on to the rotten bay window.

No checks were carried out on the window ceiling after the leak and James Mutch, one of the care home’s joint owners, said he saw no need to carry out a major check of the ceiling’s integrity in the lounge or order a safety check on the lounge’s electrics.

But yesterday Mrs Potter’s son, Bill Kirk , asked Mr Wright, as a HSE expert, whether checks should have been carried out.

Mr Wright agreed they should have but said he was unsurprised they were not. Most homes, even in ancient buildings, would be unlikely to carry them out, he said.

But he suggested that, in order to meet British Standards code of practice, routine checks of the window ceiling should have been carried out. He said flat-roofed windows were well-known problem areas in buildings of this age.

He added that repairs carried out at the home were “patch jobs” and were bound to fail at some stage.