Grieving mother ‘forced to wait for three hours in A&E with baby’s body in a bag after miscarriage’
A GRIEVING mother who had suffered a miscarriage said she was left sitting in A&E for three hours with her baby’s body in an overnight bag beside her.
Tammy Anderson, 33, had rung the hospital after miscarrying at home and was told to bring her dead baby with her to A&E.
But when she arrived, despite telling staff she was expected, she said she was told to sit down and went to the back of the queue as she was formally logged.
Miss Anderson, who was so distressed she was sick five times as she waited, also heard staff gossiping about where she had put her baby, whom she had named Archie.
And even after she was seen, she said the hospital handled her case with little compassion and later misplaced Archie’s body, which was due to be taken to the mortuary.
Yesterday the mother- of-two said: ‘It’s disgusting. I always said hospitals don’t want to deal with people until it’s life or death. Now I know even when there’s a death they’ve got no interest.
‘They don’t work in a professional way at all. What does it take before they’ll show some compassion? They came across as if it was just a job they’re getting paid to do.’
She said she was speaking out in the hope she can shame Queen’s Hospital in Romford, Essex, into treating people more humanely.
Miss Anderson, who was 15 weeks pregnant, went into labour at her home in nearby Dagenham at 6am on June 13. The miscarriage was so quick she could not get to hospital and her 14-year-old daughter Jamie-Leigh had to help with the delivery.
When she contacted the hospital, she was initially told someone would come out to see her, but she was then rung back and told to go to A&E with Archie’s body.
She placed him in an overnight bag with tissue paper at the bottom so it was ‘like a carry cot’ before she was driven to hospital by her sister-in-law.
Miss Anderson, an events planner who lives with mechanic Shaun Hammond, 44, and her two children from a previous relationship, said: ‘When I got there I asked: “Don’t I get put in a room or something? I’ve got my dead baby with me”. But they told me to sit down.
‘I felt like my body had just frozen. I was sick five times in there. I was in so much shock. There were two ladies on the [reception] desk. They kept on talking about the baby and where I had put him. My sister-in-law had to ask them not to be disrespectful. It made me feel worse and very uncomfortable.’
A doctor finally saw her at 10.30am, more than three hours after she arrived at A&E, but she said her distressing experience continued.
Miss Anderson said: ‘When I handed the baby to them they put it on a table like it was a piece of meat.
‘I was informed they were going to notify a bereavement midwife and I’d get a call the next day. No one contacted me at all so I rang at 5.30pm and was told there was no record of someone needing to call me.
‘They also had no record of where my baby was because it hadn’t been put on the system. The midwife had to hunt down my baby.
‘At 10am the next day I was told it had been taken from A&E to the early pregnancy unit and stayed there until 8am when the morgue opened.’ A final blow came when she wrote a letter of complaint a week later. She received an apology and was asked if she would like to arrange to go to the hospital to discuss the matter further.
‘I asked them not to phone me on June 30 because it was the day of my baby’s funeral,’ she added.
‘He’d been buried only an hour when the case worker rang. I asked them to call me back that night or the next day but no one’s got back to me since.’
Miss Anderson said the experience had left her feeling ‘like an empty shell’. She is now considering legal action and has consulted a solicitor.
kathryn Halford, chief nurse at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, told the Daily Mirror: ‘We are very sorry to hear of her poor experience with us. We’re investigating her case fully and have also invited her into our hospital so we can discuss what happened in more detail.
‘Miss Anderson has so far not taken us up on this offer; however, we’d welcome the opportunity to meet with her.’
‘I was in so much shock’