An inquest in to the death of baby Ebony Mccall has stated that the standards of care on the maternity ward at Milton Keynes General Hospital were below what they should have been. According to the BBC, Ebony suffered from a faint heartbeat after being born by caesarean section and died in May 2009.
Her mother, Amanda Mccall, suffered from several medical conditions including cardiac disease. Ms Mccall was initially denied a Caesarean birth because it was deemed too risky. She had been admitted with severe stomach pains and this should have made her a high risk patient, and she should have been afforded one to one midwife care. However, this was not granted due to a lack of staffing at the hospital and her daughter Ebony was born with an erratic heartbeat, a pathologist revealed that she had suffered from oxygen deprivation.
With additional care Ms Mccall may have been able to have a caesarean at an earlier stage and taking in to account her medical history, her pregnancy should have been “consultant led at the outset”, according to consultant Anthony Stock.
A Healthcare Commission investigation was conducted in to the hospital in 2008, prior to the incident, and the inquest found that many of the recommendations of the report had not been met. The hospital acknowledged that funding was available to employ more midwives, but that they had struggled to recruit additional staff.
This appears to be an unfortunate case of too many patients and not enough staff leading to a drop in the standard of care afforded to patients and unsurprisingly circumstances such as Ebony’s death are bound to occur when those two factors collide. The hospital needs to find new ways of recruiting people to the profession rather than stretching their resources even further than they already are if they are to avoid similar incidents in future.
