A baby dying from kidney failure was saved when her doctor designed and built her a dialysis machine from scratch in his garage.
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The job of the kidneys is to ‘clean’ the blood, and if they fail, a dialysis machine can do this job instead.
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However, Dr Coulthard, together with senior children’s kidney nurse Jean Crosier, devised a smaller version, then built it away from the hospital. Millie was connected to the machine over a seven day period, allowing her own kidneys to recover.

Rebecca, from Middlesbrough, said: “It was a green metal box with a few paint marks on it with quite a few wires coming out of it into my daughter - it didn’t look like a normal NHS one.
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The machine is still in use, helping babies in similar circumstances to Millie, but Dr Coulthard told the Newcastle Journal newspaper that an official version was needed. “This machine is only being used on the tiniest, earliest babies where there is nothing else that can be done.

“But if we had a machine that we could use much more freely, then we would be able to deal with many more babies and have a much greater chance of saving lives.”