BABIES WHOSE LIVES SHOULD HAVE BEEN SAVED
FAMILY DELIGHT TURNED TO DESPAIR
In photographs Colin and Kayleigh Griffiths look delighted as they show off their new arrival.
Cradled on mum’s lap, shortly after being born in a planned home birth in north Shropshire, is Pippa next to her big sister Brooke. All the family delighted.
But a day later, on April 27, 2016, Pippa died from an infection she contracted during her birth.
A midwife said she would return in the afternoon after the baby was born – but never turned up, the inquest was told.
Colin and Kayleigh had been concerned about Pippa’s feeding and contacted midwives shortly after her birth, who reassured them. But in the early hours of the following day, their daughter had vomited brown mucus. Later that morning, her condition worsened. She developed a purple rash and then stopped breathing. Emergency services managed to get her breathing again, but she later died.
The inquest was told that the trust accepted it should have given Pippa’s mother a leaflet explaining trigger words so she could have accessed help and accepts a midwife should have returned to see her within 2 hours.
It is also accepted that during a phone call, if they had asked the right questions and got the right responses, the baby would have survived at that point. There was also a possibility the baby could have survived if she had gone to the hospital.
HE WOULD HAVE BEEN SEVEN THIS MONTH
Kate and Andrew Barnett from Newtown lost their son Jenson two days after his birth in June 2013, after he suffered brain trauma during an unsuccessful forceps delivery.
Last night Mrs Barnett, 35, said: ‘Jenson would have been seven this month and there isn’t a day goes by that we don’t think of him.
‘I welcome this investigation and hope someone will be held accountable.’
She said the consultants had to use forceps during the delivery, but they ‘could not work out which way his (Jenson’s) head was to apply them, so they applied them incorrectly.
‘When they went to pull him the bed shunted back and the forceps slipped off his head. I then got rushed for an emergency caesarean section.’
Mrs Barnett said Jenson was born a ‘good few hours’ after showing signs of stress, and she too almost died after losing three pints of blood.
Their son was taken away and they did
not see him for seven or eight hours, and when they did he had ‘tubes coming out of him and marks on his head’. The distraught parents were told Jenson would not survive the night, and he died on June18.
‘When you go to hospital to have a baby, you don’t expect to come home without a baby,’ said Mrs Barnett.
Jenson’s inquest was held the following year, where a coroner ruled the injuries he suffered during birth were ‘avoidable’.
Mrs Barnett said they got through the grief of losing a baby with family and friends. Two years after they lost their son the couple gave birth to daughter Isla, now five. ‘Jenson is very much part of the family and will never be forgotten,’ Mrs Barnett said.
COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO DO THEIR JOBS
In 2014, Kelly Jones, a mother of two, discovered she was pregnant with twin girls. During the pregnancy, she felt pain but despite repeatedly asking staff at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital to assess her properly, she was ignored.
By the time medics had eventually taken her seriously, her twin girls, Ella and Lola were stillborn.
A letter from the trust to Mrs Jones said its investigation showed ‘that both babies had died from severe hypoxic ischemia (oxygen starvation to the brain) contributed to by delay in recognising deterioration in the foetal heart traces and missed opportunities for earlier delivery.’
The midwife came in crying, saying: ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ Mrs Jones said at the time. ‘My girls are gone because they couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs.’
Although the letter, dated June 201 , promised improvements in heart rate monitoring, two months later another baby died in similar circumstances.