Family rejects coroner’s finding that newborn’s heart defect death was unpreventable
Rex Martinich
A family whose daughter died of an undiagnosed heart condition just hours after her birth have rejected a coroner’s finding that her death was preventable.
Thea Flaskett died on the morning of September 11, 2023, just over four hours after being born in a Queensland hospital.
The inquest was told the newborn baby suffered from a congenital defect called translocation of the great arteries, which affects blood flow through the heart.
Thea’s mother, Meg Flaskett, had a routine morphology scan at the 20th week of her pregnancy in May 2023, and no defects were detected.
“The weight of the evidence supports a finding that Thea’s death was not preventable because her transposition of the great arteries was not detected [before birth]Assistant Queensland State Attorney Stephanie Gallagher said in her findings on Monday.
Regardless of the quality of the scans, Thea’s heart defect was “not an unusual occurrence” to be missed during pregnancy, Gallagher found.
Thea’s mother and her partner, James Flaskett, called for an investigation into her death at hearings held in Brisbane last year.
In a statement criticizing the findings of the inquiry, Ms Flaskett said the family was “devastated but not surprised by the outcome”.
“Had Thea’s condition been diagnosed before birth, her labor, delivery and emergency treatment would have been fundamentally different,” he said.
He disputed that the heart defect was the only significant thing that contributed to Thea’s death at Redcliffe Hospital, north of Brisbane.
“Although these findings bring the judicial process to an end, they do not bring us peace and do not answer the questions that have driven us for almost three years,” he said.
Queensland Health’s supervising sonographer, Craig John Collins, testified at the inquest that he performed about 150 ultrasounds a year and had only discovered one case of transposition on a scan.
In his findings, Gallagher said: “Ideally Thea [heart defect] It would be suspected during Ms. Flaskett’s morphology scan and diagnosed shortly thereafter by a maternal-fetal medicine specialist or pediatric cardiologist.
Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital senior staff neonatologist Pieter Koorts said even if Thea’s heart defect was detected and she was born in a major city hospital and underwent emergency surgery, her survival was “not guaranteed”.
Gallagher said staff at Redcliffe Hospital were doing everything they could with the resources they had.
“Although he resuscitated Thea to a high standard, her outcome was determined by the underlying congenital heart abnormality, not the standard of her postnatal care,” he said.
Gallagher suggested Metro North Health consider adopting bedside live streaming services and neonatal retrieval processes used in NSW.
AAP
