Our client, Mrs H, fell pregnant in September 2019, aged 26, and she and her husband looked forward to becoming parents for the first time.
Sadly, a series of early booking scans in November first questioned then confirmed the absence of a heartbeat and that their baby, J, had tragically passed in utero.
Arrangements were made for a surgical management of the miscarriage, which was booked to take place late in November. The evening before, however, Mrs H suffered heavy bleeding and a suspected miscarriage.
She and her husband attended the William Harvey Hospital Ashford’s A&E department where she was triaged and sent to the Major’s area. As the Trust’s own Route Cause Analysis Investigation Report (RCA) later acknowledged:- “..given that she had presented with vaginal bleeding, she should have been accommodated in an area of the department where her privacy and dignity could be maintained…”
Nearly an hour after they arrived in the department, Mrs H and her husband had to deliver J in a cubicle within the toilets. It was traumatic for them both to have to experience such a devastating event in a wholly inappropriate environment.
J’s foetus was placed into a special container with Mrs H completing a special consent form for the pregnancy tissues to retained for a special cremation to be arranged through the hospital chaplaincy.
After treatment and further investigations, she was discharged home the following day.
A cremation and service for J was arranged for Christmas Eve that year.
However, when Mrs H contacted the hospital, 3 days after her discharge, enquiring about J, this prompted a frantic series of calls within the A&E department and to the hospital laboratory during which it emerged that the William Harvey Hospital had, incredibly, managed to lose the products of conception without trace.
When Mrs H phoned the hospital again, a few days later, she was advised that they had been unable to find the foetus and that it was thought likely that there had been a “disposal…by accident”.
The whole experience left Mrs H depressed and traumatised grieving, in particular, the lost opportunity to say a final goodbye to her child.
The Trust’s subsequent RCA investigation concluded that the foetus had been disposed of rather than sent to the laboratory giving as the “main causal factor” for this distraction within the department because it was “extremely busy”. Further, staff were not able to readily access information about the correct processes to be followed.Mrs H subsequently raised the matter with the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman who investigated and advised that she should take legal action.
Fairweathers were instructed and investigated the case fully, sending a Letter of Claim in June 2023.
An expert psychiatrist examined Mrs H and advised that she had suffered psychiatric injury on account of the Trust’s failings.
Within a Letter of Response sent in October 2023, NHS Resolution, on behalf of the East Kent Trust, made full admissions that the staff working at the William Harvey Hospital were negligent in their management of the remains of Mrs H’s miscarried child resulting in the wrongful disposal of the foetus.
The case was subsequently settled in the sum of £4,000.
The case was dealt with at Fairweathers by Francesca Beach.
Nick Fairweather was scathing in his comments upon the case:- “This is a truly shocking case in which the East Kent Trust has displayed a combination of incredible insensitivity coupled with gross incompetence. Typically, no one was found individually culpable or held to account for what occurred through the Trust’s investigations. It is truly horrendous that in a modern hospital setting, a miscarrying mother has to deliver her baby in a toilet cubical and even then the hospital manages to somehow lose the baby robbing this young couple of the opportunity to say a proper goodbye which is so important in these circumstances. Shame on everyone involved.
I pay tribute to the strength and courage displayed by these parents and their mutual loving support for one another throughout this ordeal. I wish them all the very best for the future.”
Pregnancy and child birth can give rise to a number of complications affecting the unborn child, newborn baby or mother. Obstetric and gynaecological cases account for the largest number of medical negligence claims brought each year.