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Grieving mother's TV plea for more midwives
A MOTHER who lost her baby daughter following complications at birth is to appear on a TV documentary tonight.
Carla Kaye's daughter Lily suffered severe brain damage when she was born breach at Dewsbury General Hospital in 2005. She died nine days later.
Although an inquest found the hospital was not guilty of neglect, Carla and husband Jonathan are suing for clinical negligence after the head midwife at its maternity unit testified she was tending to two women at once when Lily was born.
Suzanne Goodall, a solicitor at Raleys, in Wakefield, who is representing the family, says staff failed to notice until the very last minute that Lily was being born
bottom-first, which led to her being starved of oxygen.
Mrs Kaye is appearing on Channel 4's Dispatches programme Undercover Mums at 8pm to speak out against falling midwife numbers.
She said she felt "completely let down" and felt she lost her baby because the hospital did not have enough staff to handle something going wrong.
"Nobody should have to go through what we have been through, but this sort of thing will keep happening to other parents unless someone listens and does something about it."
Suzanne Goodall added that the situation is being repeated time and time again as maternity staff shortages across the country leave mothers and babies at serious risk.
"The people at the top in government have the power to do something but they have to be made to listen," she said. "Hopefully Carla and Jonathan's story will hit a nerve somewhere and Lily's death will not have been in vain."
The Royal College of Midwives warns that while hospitals have to cope with more and more births, cuts in funding and job freezes are leaving maternity wards understaffed. It believes an extra 3,000 fully trained midwives are needed across the UK just to maintain baseline services.
Sharon Schofield, head of nursing and midwifery for The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust said: "What happened was a tragedy and everyone involved was absolutely devastated.
"Although there is nothing that we can ever say or do to lessen the family's loss, we have made sure that we learned from what happened to minimise the risk of anything like this happening again."
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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