Findings on baby death
THE death of a 24-day-old Tasmanian baby in 2011 could have been prevented if the state’s child protection service had taken appropriate action, a coroner has found.
In her findings, released yesterday, into baby Teegan Rose Hayes’ death, Coroner Olivia McTaggart said Teegan was accidentally suffocated while sleeping with her parents on November 4, 2011, and died in hospital in Hobart on November 6. Ms McTaggart said Teegan should not have been in her parents’ care.
She said Teegan’s parents, Kim Fox and Robert Hayes, who were living at East Devonport when Teegan was born, both “suffered deficits in intellectual functioning”.
Ms Fox, who had four children with Mr Hayes and three children from an earlier relationship, had been the subject of a “long history of child protection notifications dating back to 1997”, Ms McTaggart said.
She said 15 notifications were made to Child Protection Services, as it was then known, about the family before Teegan was born.
The risk factors identified in the notifications included the incapacity of the parents to adequately care for their children due to their intellectual disabilities, alcohol abuse, particularly Ms Fox, parental neglect, lack of supervision of the children, and inappropriate methods of discipline. Ms McTaggart said if a correct risk assessment had been done, it would have likely resulted in an application to remove Tee- gan from the family at birth.
Ms McTaggart said since Teegan’s death, and following her findings into the deaths of two other infants, Jasmine Rose Pearce and BJay Johnstone, that included recommendations to improve the state’s child protection system, the State Government was committed to “significant reforms”.
She said it was therefore not necessary for her to repeat her previous recommendations.
Ms McTaggart did make two recommendations in the most recent findings: that the child protection service continually train its officers on identifying and responding to situations where an infant may be at risk due to unsafe sleeping practices, and that her findings are used to help inform the development of the Tasmanian Strategic Framework for Infants and Babies.