Parents 'destroyed' after baby's death at Royal Sussex County Hospital

Parents of a two-day-old girl who died in hospital after an emergency C-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.

On 21 January 2022, Mr Miller and Katie Fowler contacted the hospital's maternity assessment unit four times during the day.

Their first phone call was to inform the maternity assessment unit Ms Fowler was in labour, then to report bleeding, and finally to tell them she had become faint and short of breath.

According to the Health Safety Investigation Branch's (HSIB) report, staff recorded that Ms Fowler sounded "distressed" in the fourth phone call to the unit, and she thought she was having a panic attack.

Staff said she could not answer questions in the fourth phone call because of her "distressed state" and she was asked to come into the hospital. Ms Fowler went into cardiac arrest on the journey in a taxi due to a uterine rupture.

An inquest last week found her life would have been prolonged if her mother had been admitted to hospital sooner.

In October, families whose babies have died or been harmed in the care of the NHS called for a statutory public inquiry into England's maternity services.

Robert Miller, Abigail's father, told BBC Newsnight: "A national inquiry is the only way forward - we cannot continue to treat every incident as a separate tragedy."

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Source: BBC News, 28 November 2023