The devastated parents of a two-day-old baby who died following an emergency Caesarean section are calling for a national inquiry into maternity services. Abigail Fowler Miller died at Brighton’s Royal Sussex County Hospital (RSCH) in January last year. Her mother, Katie Fowler, had contacted the hospital’s maternity assessment unit four times on 21 January 2022. Their first call was to inform the unit that Ms. Fowler was in labour, then to report bleeding, and finally to tell them she had become faint and short of breath.
According to a report by the Health Safety Investigation Branch, staff recorded that Fowler sounded “distressed” in the fourth call to the unit, and she thought she was having a panic attack. Staff said she couldn’t answer questions in the fourth phone call because of her “distressed state” and she was asked to come into the hospital. Fowler went into cardiac arrest in a taxi due to a uterine rupture on the way to the hospital. Abigail was resuscitated after being born via caesarean. Both she and her mother needed resuscitating, and Ms Fowler was placed into an induced coma.
An inquest concluded last week that if Ms Fowler had been admitted to the hospital sooner, her baby’s life would have been prolonged. The coroner found that the policy of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, which runs RSCH, required people to have an invitation to attend an assessment. Speaking about her daughter’s death, Fowler said: “Abigail should still be with us. We miss her every single day, but it isn’t just about our loss. It’s also about hers, of the life she should have had.”
The HSIB report states that Fowler should have been invited into the hospital for an assessment following her third phone call to the maternity assessment unit. The report found that the call document was “not completed fully” to allow staff to do a “dynamic risk assessment” of Fowler when the couple called. It said this resulted in staff not being alerted to the “changing clinical picture”. The HSIB recommended that guidance be put in place to support staff with making decisions on maternity telephone triage services, and a risk assessment tool should be available for the telephone triage service to identify mothers who need an ambulance to get to hospital immediately.
The Brighton couple is now calling for a national inquiry into NHS maternity services and urging NHS trusts to be willing to have open and honest conversations. “The government needs to look at the pattern of consistent failures across the UK and make real changes to maternity care to reverse the decline of this vital service,” said Abigail’s father, Robert Miller
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