A RETIRED dress designer was found hanged after doctors failed to successfully ease her pain, an inquest heard.

After months of seeing numerous doctors Carole Riley’s devoted husband, Paul, decided to seek help from the pain management service at Bolton One on September 1 last year.

But when he returned to their home in Ascot Road, Little Lever, he found 65-year-old Mrs Riley.

Paramedics managed to get her heart restarted, but she had suffered brain damage and died in the Royal Bolton Hospital a week later.

Mr Riley told assistant coroner Rachel Griffin how he had felt let down by the medical professionals as he and his wife struggled to find answers for the pain she was suffering.

He said: “I wouldn’t single any one person out, but there does not seem to be any liaison between them.

“It is like a dance troupe with too many prima donnas in it.”

Mr Riley, a retired electrician told the court how his wife had received bereavement counselling following the death of their son several years ago and in the months before her death she had been treated for depression.

The court heard how Mrs Riley had survived breast cancer in 1995, but had high blood pressure and cholesterol and suffered from osteoporosis.

After starting with hip pain in mid 2014 doctors referred her for physiotherapy.

But during her first appointment for physiotherapy at Bolton One on February 25 last year she was asked to use a cycle and complained about knee pain afterwards.

“I just put it down to the exercise she had just had and that she wasn’t used to it,” said Mr Riley.

“But that was the catalyst over what went on.”

He said her pain increased and spread to other areas of her body, even including her eyes and teeth and, shortly before she died, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

But he said that, despite seeing numerous GPs and consultants, she was passed around the healthcare system, did not get the help she needed and was in great pain.

“It was like a game of badminton and Carole, unfortunately, was the shuttlecock,” he said.

Six weeks before her death he said she took sleeping tablets, but not a fatal number and admitted what she had done.

He told Mrs Griffin that she told him 'I’ve been silly and I won’t do it again' and so he believes she did not intentionally kill herself.

On September 1, after making an early morning visit to a supermarket to buy eye drops for his wife, Mr Riley set off to seek help from doctors at the pain management service.

“We kissed each other and I said ‘I’m going to sort it out’,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have gone if I thought she was going to do that.”

The inquest continues and is expected to last two days.