Essex hospital faces 12 legal cases over maternity care

Violet Stephens was admitted to Queen’s Hospital in April this year with pre-eclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition in pregnant women.

But she died on the maternity unit on 9 April. A report into the death of the 35-year-old mother at a maternity unit in Essex has uncovered a ‘succession of failures’ into her care.

Running to more than 70 pages the serious untoward incident report says that in the three days before her death Ms Stephens saw 5 different consultant obstetricians, 11 junior doctors, 12 different midwives and two nurses. It also found a failure to administer a blood transfusion as planned, a delay in making the decision to deliver her baby, “tests were carried out late” and “results not looked at in good time”. When Ms Stephens was found unresponsive with gasping breath, it took 25 minutes for a cardiac arrest call to be made.

Three children have now been left without a mother.

Now Channel 4 News has learned that 12 women or their families are taking legal action against the Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, which includes Queens Hospital.

These include the husband of Tebussum Ali (known as Serena), who died, along with her newborn baby in January this year. The report into those deaths said hospital staff failed to spot the signs of a ruptured womb. They then tried to resuscitate her with a disconnected oxygen mask. The trust has accepted that the care given to her was “of an unacceptable standard”.

Following this incident, the Care Quality Commission, which regulates and inspects health services in England, issued a warning to the hospital. The inspectors said the maternity unit was often understaffed, that some staff were carrying out tasks for which they did not feel appropriately skilled and that this was “putting women and babies at risk”.

Sarah Harman, the solicitor acting for the women or their families, said there was a catalogue of failures, including a still birth that could have been avoided, caesarians performed without sufficient anaesthetic, as well as the deaths of two mothers and a baby.

“The first referral I got was the tragic death of Serena Ali. It was such a horrific situation that I thought it must be an isolated incident because sometimes tragedies happen” Ms Harman said. “But there is a clear pattern emerging from clients coming from Queens. These are clients who have felt they have had bad care, that their lives and health has been put at risk; that their babies’ lives have been put at risk.

“There was no acknowledgement of the poor care and no suggestion that anyone is going to learn lessons and put things right. That suggests to me a very bad culture at the hospital.”

It is nearly 11 months since Georgina Lloyd gave birth to her daughter Isla and she is still angry over the way she was treated by the hospital. Channel 4 News has seen the serious untoward incident report written after that birth.

This found that it took three days to induce her after her waters broke, staff discharged her without spotting the signs she had an infection – then the community midwife did not do basic checks and also failed to spot an infection. The end result was she was admitted to intensive care with pneumonia and separated from Isla for a nearly a week.

Ms Lloyd said she cried every day that she was separated from her new baby. “When I got a bit better and a bit stronger I did write to them and said look this isn’t right.” But she said that quite a few months later all she received back was a letter failing to acknowledge her complaints.

“All I wanted them to do was recognise what happened, to apologise and to make sure it didn’t happen to any other woman,” Ms Lloyd said.

The trust chief executive, Averil Dongworth, said there had been staff shortages but that more midwives had been recruited, more training had been put in place and that there was now a better complaints system. Mrs Dongworth said that she wanted to apologise on behalf of the trust to any women who felt let down.

“These events that you are talking about happened some time ago and I can’t guarantee that there will never be another event but I can guarantee that we are putting everything into place to minimise the risk to women and to make sure this is a safe unit for women to deliver their babies.”

The CQC is due to publish another report into the state of maternity services here. And they have already told the trust that if they fail to improve they could face prosecution. Shortly after Channel 4 News spoke to Ms Lloyd, she was told that the hospital had accepted negligence in her case.