Lancaster baby’s death due to midwives’ gross failures, coroner rules

Delivering his conclusion, Dr Adeley, said: “Ida was a normal child whose death was caused by a lack of oxygen during her delivery that occurred due to the gross failure of the three midwives attending her to provide basic medical care to deliver Ida urgently when it was apparent she was in distress.”

And he noted that her death was contributed to by the lead midwife’s “wholly incompetent” failure to provide basic neonatal resuscitation during the first three-and-half minutes of her life.

This, he said, further contributed to the infant’s brain damage.

The senior coroner also criticised the hospital’s investigation into Ida’s death, calling it a “damning indictment of an ineffective, dysfunctional and callous system that has failed this family at every opportunity”.

UHMBT was the subject of a damning report in 2015 that found a “lethal mix” of problems at another of its maternity units at Furness General Hospital that led to the unnecessary deaths of 11 babies and one mother between 2004 and 2013.

The Morecambe Bay investigation, chaired by Dr Bill Kirkup, uncovered a series of failures “at every level”, from the unit itself to those responsible for regulating and monitoring the trust.

Additional reporting by PA Media.