A five-year-old girl died during an operation to remove her spleen when surgeons at the John Radcliffe Hospital used a new piece of equipment, an inquest heard.

Bethany Bowen's father Richard Bowen told the hearing at Oxford Coroner's Court that he and his wife had assumed the equipment, called a morcellator, was a standard piece of equipment.

He said after his daughter's death they were told by surgeons that the blade had cut through a major blood vessel.

Bethany, from Cricklade, near Swindon, suffered from a hereditary condition called spherocytosis. The condition causes anaemia which can only be cured by removing the spleen.

The inquest heard that her brother William also had the condition and had his spleen removed in an operation when he was two.

Mr Bowen told the inquest: "We completely trusted the people involved.

"If they had said they were using a new piece of equipment they had never used before, that was a different matter."

The inquest continues.