‘After my baby died, NHS colleagues mocked me’

Jack Hawkins used to love his job as a doctor at the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. It was where he met his wife, Sarah, a senior physiotherapist. It was where, seven years later, the couple planned she would give birth to their first child, a daughter they would call Harriet. They trusted their colleagues to take care of them.

Their colleagues failed, horrifically. Harriet was stillborn after a catalogue of errors by midwives and doctors in 2016.

After a lengthy legal battle, the couple received £2.8 million in compensation in 2021 and have since been at the forefront of efforts to expose the NHS’s largest maternity scandal. Some 2,500 cases are now being examined.

Almost nine years after Harriet’s death, her parents continue to learn new and horrific details about what happened to her.

It can now be revealed that the hospital allowed her body to decompose so badly in the months after her death that she had to be “triple-bagged” when placed into a coffin for her funeral. Her parents only discovered the horrific failure last summer after forcing the trust to release a cache of internal emails.

A few months later they learnt that staff recorded a 2017 phone call made by Jack, a former medical consultant at the trust, without his consent, and played it at a meeting of senior midwives months later. In this meeting they allegedly “mocked” the grieving father.

Jack said the revelations made him feel sick. “It is an abuse,” he said. “This encapsulates the failures in values, behaviours and quality of care that has caused so much harm and death in Nottingham.”

Sarah added: “They couldn’t even look after Harriet when she was dead. How much more can they put us through? It’s never ending.”

Anthony May, a former chief executive at Nottingham county council, who was appointed to lead the trust and its response to the maternity scandal in 2022, said: “There are many examples of where we have compounded the harm experienced by Jack and Sarah through the way in which we have communicated with them and dealt with their inquiries and concerns. I am committed to improving the way in which we engage with Jack and Sarah, and the wider group of affected families.”

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Source: The Times, 2 March 2025