‘My daughter was failed at birth’
Telegraph cartoonist Bob Moran says lessons have not been learnt since Poppy suffered brain damage, five years ago
Staring through the rainstreaked windscreen of the ambulance, I watched the cars in front of us swerving frantically to one side. As we hurtled out of town and joined the motorway, the driver switched off the siren and I began to ask him technical questions about his vehicle. I needed to keep talking to take my mind off what was going on.
I remember him telling me that specially adapted ambulances like this one cost about a quarter of a million each. And there aren’t enough of them to cope with demand. I asked him if he had children. He told me he did and that being a dad was the best job in the world. I had been a dad for five hours. My daughter, Poppy, was lying in an incubator behind me, entwined with tubes and wires, fighting for her life. She had suffered severe brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation during labour.
This week, a heartbreaking audit by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists concluded that three quarters of the hundreds of babies who die or suffer brain damage each year could be saved by better care. The report by the Each Baby Counts project found that of the 1,123 babies who were stillborn, died during labour or in their first week of life, or suffered brain damage during 2016, there were an average of seven contributory factors to each death or injury – highlighting a lack of training, communication and staffing which led to a failure to spot or react to warning signs. The report is upsetting, but reading it I felt more anger than sadness. Five years on from our own horrific experience, lessons have still not been learnt.
At 8.30pm the night before Poppy was born, I had driven my wife, Sal, to hospital for the third time in as many days. She was 11 days overdue and had been having contractions for five days. Foetal movement had become infrequent and weak and we were anxious. We saw a midwife at around 10pm who said that she didn’t need to carry out an examination and that we should go home as there was nothing to worry about. By now, my wife was as pale and exhausted as I have ever seen a person look. Nevertheless, she managed to fix the midwife with a determined glare and say four words that would save our little girl’s life: “We’re not going anywhere.”
That didn’t go down very well. We were told we couldn’t have a bed because we didn’t really need to be in hospital. We could, however, wait in one of the family rooms if we really wanted to. The midwife didn’t monitor the baby.
We were then passed to and fro between different nurses and midwives, on different wards, all of whom obsessed over the fact that our birth plan said we wanted a midwifeled birth in a water bath with music and incense. They seemed unable to comprehend that we had abandoned the plan and just wanted to speak to a doctor. No doctor was summoned, no notes were read, no information was properly communicated and again, our baby was not monitored.
Instead, we were shown to a dingy room containing a small sofa and a bath covered in brown stains and left there for six hours. Intermittently, I ventured out into the corridor and pleaded to see a doctor. Every time, I was told that no doctors were available.
At 4.30 in the morning my wife was deemed tired enough to be given a bed and some morphine to help her sleep. At 7.30am, 11 hours after we had arrived on the ward, a CTG monitor was connected to trace the baby’s heartbeat. The trace was almost completely flat. When the consultant eventually saw us on his morning round, he looked at the CTG trace, glanced at the notes and immediately ordered an emergency caesarean.
Poppy was delivered at 11.44am on February 12 2013 and had to be resuscitated in theatre. Once she was breathing, I clasped her tiny hand and introduced myself. At the sound of my voice she let out a pained cry. She would not make another sound until she was six days old. They whisked her away to intensive care before my wife could see her.
A couple of hours went by. A nurse came to our room to say that Poppy had been brain-damaged and was having seizures. She would have to be transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Southmead Hospital in Bristol to receive the care she needed. I could go with her in the ambulance but my wife would have to follow later.
My amazing, brave, hilariously funny Poppy is now five years old. She has cerebral palsy, which affects all four limbs and makes walking and balancing difficult. She has poor eyesight, which, combined with her lack of balance, means she falls over several times a day, often cutting or bruising herself. But she rarely cries and hardly ever agrees to use her wheelchair. Poppy’s brother, Dillon, is 20 months younger than her and a typically energetic three-year-old. He’s incredibly patient with her, though like all little brothers, he has his limits. Knowing whether to have a second baby was difficult, but it was by far the best decision we’ve ever made.
Poppy has epileptic seizures at night, which usually last so long that we have to call an ambulance. She
The cost to the NHS is quantifiable and vast, – the cost to families is immeasurable
requires physiotherapy, occupational therapy, hydrotherapy, speech therapy, hip surgery, Botox injections, glasses, foot splints, various medications, equipment to help her around the home and extra help at school. All of this is costing the Government, and us, thousands of pounds a year, and Poppy’s level of disability is, relatively speaking, quite mild. We are also in the long and arduous process of taking legal action against the trust responsible for her injury.
The financial cost of insufficient investment in maternity care is quantifiable and vast – maternity negligence claims against the NHS, the majority of which come from cases of cerebal palsy or brain damage, totalled £2.1billion last year. But for children like Poppy, who have to struggle every day, and for the hundreds of other families who lose babies due to poor care, the cost is immeasurable.
I am now an ambassador for the charity Baby Lifeline, which provides specialist equipment and training to maternity and neonatal units, with the aim of ensuring that every expectant mother and unborn baby receives appropriate monitoring.
If the midwives involved in our story had received better training, if they had known how to communicate more effectively, if monitoring equipment had been more readily available and used appropriately and if, when the limits of their knowledge were exceeded, they had called a doctor without hesitation, Poppy’s life would be very different today.
Sometimes I find myself back in that ambulance. Staring through the windscreen at parting traffic, wishing I had done things differently. Been more assertive, less trusting, gone to a different hospital. But every day, Poppy reminds me to keep looking forward with hope. We as a nation owe it to her, to ourselves and to all babies who have suffered, to ensure a future where every child born in the UK is given the best possible chance of life.
For more information or to donate to Baby Lifeline, visit: babylifeline.org.uk