‘Drunk’ Belgian anaesthetist charged with manslaughter

A BELGIAN anaesthetist who was alleged to have been drunk when she took part in a botched caesarean section operation has been charged with the manslaughter of Xynthia Hawke, her British patient.

The clinic she worked for in the French Pyrenees town of Orthez has also been charged with manslaughter over the 2014 death of the 28-year-old, whose son Isaac survived and is in good health and being brought up by her French partner.

Helga Wauters, 47, the anaesthetist who investigators said was a chronic alcoholic, was allegedly found to have been drunk at the time of the intervention that led to the death of Ms Hawke, who was originally from Somerset.

She was called back to administer a second epidural after the birth because the patient was still in great pain.

Colleagues testified that the doctor, who faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison if found guilty, smelled of alcohol when she returned to the operating room.

She struggled to insert the breathing tube and mistakenly placed it in her patient’s oesophagus instead of her windpipe. Ms Hawke was starved of oxygen, suffered a heart attack and went into a coma. She died four days later.

French prosecutors claim Wauters was sacked by a hospital in Belgium in 2013 for making an error during a caesarean section caused by her drinking and was dismissed by another hospital a year later after colleagues said she smelled of alcohol during an epidural.

Thierry Sagardoytho, the lawyer for the clinic, said he would seek to have the charges thrown out, as happened at an appeal court in 2017 after a previous attempt to prosecute the clinic.