North Yorkshire death crash couple both health workers

The couple died on this stretch of road on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales

A couple from Harrogate who died in a car crash both worked for the health service in the town, it has emerged.

Nathan Fielding, 32, of Camwal Terrace, Starbeck, and Kate Henderson, 37, of Regent Avenue, died in a head-on collision near Burnt Yates on Tuesday.

Mr Fielding worked at Harrogate District Hospital as a laboratory scientist. His partner was a mental health outreach worker.

An inquest into their deaths was opened and adjourned on Thursday, police said.

Harrogate District Hospital's medical director Dr Carl Gray paid tribute to Mr Fielding, with whom he had worked in the department of histopathology.

'Very fine man'

He said Mr Fielding joined the hospital six years ago as a laboratory assistant but completed four years of postgraduate training in the summer to become a biomedical scientist.

"It is particularly tragic that having completed training in his speciality and having been given a full-time post here he should be taken from us so suddenly at this time," said Dr Gray. "We remember Nathan as a cheerful and hard-working laboratory scientist who greatly enhanced the lives of all his colleague and friends."

He said a service of remembrance for Mr Fielding at the hospital chapel on Thursday had been attended by many colleagues from the hospital and also from the Odeon cinema in Harrogate, where he had worked part time.

Police want to hear from anyone who witnessed the accident involving the couple's Peugeot 306 and an Audi A8 on the B6165 Ripley to Pateley Bridge road at about 1310 GMT on Tuesday.

A man and a woman in their 50s, who were travelling in the Audi, are being treated at Harrogate District Hospital for serious, but not life-threatening injuries.