A pioneering unit in the West Midlands that has been the only bright spot in Britain’s woeful record on stillbirths has seen its workload scaled back as a result of NHS reconfiguration.
Helen Mallison thinks about her first baby Amber constantly. She was born at 39 weeks – a perfect little girl.
But at some point in the days before she entered the world, her heart had stopped.
She died before her parents ever had the chance to know her and Helen remembers cradling Amber’s lifeless body.
“You have to create a lifetime of memories in just a few hours, which we did … We spent a lot of time cuddling: I think we spent about three hours with her and then decided that we couldn’t turn back time, nothing was going to change and it was time to say goodbye. So we asked the hospital to take her away rather than leave her in an empty room,” she says.
Amber had stopped growing, her mother’s placenta couldn’t sustain her – but there was no other explanation for her death.
Helen recalls: “She was just beautiful and perfect and I still remember now the feeling that my heart was going to burst into flames because I just fell instantly in love with her, and I just felt like a mummy which I was. And it was just a very, very special time.”
Thousands of babies are stillborn in Britain each year. Many of those deaths could be prevented – but a globally renowned professor of maternal care tells tonight’s Channel 4 News that lives are being needlessly lost because of the government’s restructuring of the NHS.
Professor Gardosi runs a life-saving maternity centre in the West Midlands, pioneering a new approach. Pregnant women seen by his midwives are measured much more scientifically than elsewhere in the country – their vital statistics plotted on a graph adjusted to take into account the mother’s weight, height and ethnicity.
So if the baby isn’t developing properly, doctors can intervene before growth is fatally restricted. In less than a decade, these techniques reduced stillbirth rates in the area by nearly 40 per cent.
It’s a success story which stands out from the rest of the country: The UK has one of the worst rates of stillbirth in the developed world.
While Scandinavian countries like Finland, Denmark and Norway are in the top five, according to figures from the Lancet, Britain comes 33rd, below Poland and the Republic of Korea.
In the UK there are around 4000 deaths a year. But since the West Midlands changed its techniques in 2005, it’s managed to cut its stillbirth rate year on year – the only region of England and Wales to have done so.
Nationally, Prof Gardosi believes his methods would save a thousand lives. Yet in March, he had to close down his unit.
He tells Channel 4 News: “Our funding was cut because we received funding from the Primary Care Trusts and the Strategic Health Authorities and they were abolished. And the Clinical Commissioning Groups who took on the budget and the commissioning of maternity services did not see the need and stated that they did not have the money to continue this. And they were hoping that this would now be solved nationally through a national programme which of course has not happened to date.”
Until April, 152 primary care trusts controlled the vast majority of local NHS spending.
Under the restructure these were scrapped and replaced by more than 200 Clinical Commissioning Groups – led by GPs. They’re now responsible for most maternity care.
According to Prof Gardosi, the new groups simply aren’t fit for purpose. He’s written to the health secretary to raise his concerns, but has had no reply.
He has now managed to scrape together just enough cash from a few hospital trusts to reopen a scaled-back service – but the future is uncertain.
For Helen, meanwhile, it’s the past that haunts her. Pregnant with her second child, she had a scan at 36 weeks and found that once again, the baby didn’t appear to be growing. She was induced a week later and gave birth to a healthy little girl – Darcie. But she can’t forget her first born.
“Amber’s with me constantly, I wear her in my locket, I carry her in my heart. It’s challenging now at times with Darcie, because while Darcie will always have an older sister, she’ll always be our second born not our first, I’ve already been a mummy for two and a half years, not for just nine months.
“For every amazing special first that we have with Darcie there’s always in the back of your mind the feeling that you should have done this with another baby already.
“Her first taste of solid foods, her first smile, her first giggle: every single first is amazing and it’s a happy time but I never forget about Amber,” she says.