Family of girl left brain-damaged at birth accept £28m NHS payout | NHS
The family of a girl who suffered a brain injury at birth have agreed to accept £28 million in compensation after the NHS trust involved admitted their mistakes led to the tragedy.
The NHS trust of Barking, Havering and Redbridge university hospitals failed to monitor the baby’s heart rate while his mother gave birth or to ask an obstetrician to review the case; Both of these conditions may have led to the girl being born in a healthy state.
The six-year-old girl suffered severe hypoxia-ischemia (loss of oxygen to her brain) when she was born at Queen’s hospital in Romford, east London, in July 2019. This condition left him severely disabled.
He has epilepsy, suffers from unpredictable seizures, and is expected to lose mobility throughout his life. He will need lifelong care to help address his cognitive and language impairments. He will also need constant supervision as he is unaware of danger and is overly friendly towards strangers.
After the family filed a lawsuit in the high court, an agreement was reached out of court. Its large size reflects the high costs of providing necessary care and the expectation that it may live to be 83 years old.
The girl’s mother has demanded ministers and NHS bosses take urgent action to overhaul maternity care, which has been under the spotlight following a series of scandals at trusts across England.
“My daughter is thriving and doing well. But it is impossible for me to forget that because of the horror of what happened to us, I was deprived of the precious birth experience of most mothers,” the mother said. Neither he nor his daughter can be identified for legal reasons.
“Seven years later, it still deeply affects me that the hospital’s name appears in the press in relation to tragedies for other families and their babies. This is despite repeated promises from the government and endless scrutiny of birth safety. Of course, someone needs to take the bull by the horns and act to change things.”
Two reviews will be published this month: midwife Donna Ockenden’s review of how mothers and babies have died or been injured while using maternity services in Nottingham, and Labor colleague Valerie Amos’s government-commissioned review of the state of maternity services and how they could be improved.
James Murray, who replaced Wes Streeting as health secretary last month, said this week transforming maternity care was a priority and services would undergo “comprehensive reform”.
He told a meeting of the government’s national maternity and newborn working group that it was “horrible” to listen to parents of dead babies. “This highlights in the strongest possible way how human and how devastating this can be and how important it is that we change,” he said.
Errors in maternity care account for 11% of all medical negligence claims against the NHS in England, but represent 53% of their value. That’s because payouts in such cases are often high, as they involve what Guy Forster, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, describes as “the most devastating, life-altering injuries” to babies.
The £28m compensation is not the largest sum the NHS has agreed to pay to resolve a case involving negligence in maternity care. It is thought that this £37m cost to resolve a case in 2020 It concerns a boy at Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS trust in London who was deprived of oxygen during his birth.
Fieldfisher solicitor Jane Weakley, who represented the family in the latest case, said: “The medical negligence team at Fieldfisher often intervenes in cases where the same terrible mistakes are repeated, leading to untold tragedies.”
Nic Kane, chief nurse at the Barking, Havering and Redbridge trust, apologized and said it had improved maternity care in recent years. “We are extremely sorry that the care this child and his family received was not good enough,” he said. “We want to reassure them, and all our expectant mothers, that since this birth in 2019 we have learned lessons, made significant changes and our maternity department is rated well by the Care Quality Commission.”
Forster said despite numerous reviews and initiatives to improve maternity care, “we are not seeing a reduction in preventable harm. The NHS needs to respond better when things go wrong. Compliance with the statutory duty of honesty is sporadic among trusts. When trusts are not transparent, vital lessons are not learned and the same patterns of harm are repeated over and over.”
