to think this story cannot be true? Non English speaking mother did not know how to feed her baby causing brain damage, as the NHS did not provide a translator.

[WannaBeWonderWoman]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5612889/Sri-Lankan-refugee-couple-set-multi-million-pound-NHS-payout.html

and if it is there must be something missing?

If there's not, this country has gone mad!

Can I ask at what point people forget that google translate also exists

This tragedy happened in 2009, only a couple of years after Google Translate was launched. A lot of the East Asian language translations are pretty ropey now, so I dread to think what they were like 9 years ago.

There's also the issue of access to a) a device to access the Internet and b) connectivity to the Internet (is there coverage? Is there WiFi easily accessible to someone who doesn't speak English? Etc)

With the current obsession with 'breast is best' it is actually not uncommon for babes to become hypoglycemic whilst Mum is trying for hours to get her milk to flow.

I'm convinced this is what happened with DS. I had EMCS at 11pm and they basically put me to bed and left me (didn't even offer ME any food never mind care about DS feeding). Nobody told me I needed to feed immediately or showed me how. I was so exhausted I'm ashamed to say I literally passed out and didn't even think about feeding DS until the next day. Nobody cared or even noticed.

The next day midwives told me to express colostrum and syringe feed - except I had no colostrum. Expressing produced nothing I could feed him and nobody seemed bothered. Breastfeeding support consisted of them pushing him roughly on my breast and making him scream. Nobody checked if I was producing milk before I was discharged - they just ticked a box to say they observed me feeding and latch looked correct. Which is useless if there's no milk!

Looking back I can see that first week when DS was so quiet and sleepy was basically because he was starving. He lost 15% birth weight in 3 days and didn't perk up until colostrum and milk finally started to flow. If it hadn't come in I'd have persisted in putting my empty breast in his mouth until he died of starvation because I was so brainwashed about formula being the devil and had no idea about how much or how often he should eat (as another pp said, I knew that bottle fed babies ate every 4hrs so I was only putting DS to the breast every 4hrs).

So the Op hasn't been back, but I am glad we are having this discussion - just sorry for the terrible circumstances that led to it. I think there is a wider debate to be had, crap like this is still going on - my DDs were born over 15 years ago and sounds like things have got worse rather than better. Can we hear from some health professionals? MNHQ?

This is why I volunteer as a translator at the local hospital. Having researched this story via the Sri Lankan community, it seems the mum was breasfeeding but baby wasn’t latching. But the real problem here is that they HAD Sri Lankan medical professionals in another part of the hospital (not maternity) but no effort was made to contact them.

Breast is best it’s not a fad as some people have said what actually needs to happen is midwives taking responsibility for their role! It’s not the method of feeding that’s the problem it’s the delivery of aftercare to patients

Similar happened to and English speaking friend who was trying to breastfeed.
The child wasn’t brain damaged but got very very sick.

Seeing as the baby was due to be bottle fed straight after birth this seems more a case of completely inadequate/non existent postnatal care rather than midwifes trying to push breast is best. I also suspect there was a strong element of rascism involved. They didn’t give this mother the time of day.

The child was the one who gets the money not the parents

This is more about the dismissal of women then a language problem. She repeatedly tried to get attention and was fobbed off. That goes past language, that just compounded it and makes a good hook for the Fail.

The husband being back at work as promptly as he was also flies in the face of much of the rhetoric around immigrants/refugees.

They weren't very good FailingMotherhood. I should know, I used to have to use them at work sometimes and it was a fucking nightmare.

The thing is though, even if they had all been speaking the exact same language, a clearly distressed baby was discharged against the wishes of the parents, without the hospital having checked he was being breastfed properly. This isn't really a language issue at all: the midwives were told about the problem, in English, by her husband.

As far as I know DS didn't feed for at least 15 hours after birth. He was born just after 7pm and got rushed off to SCBU. I got taken to theatre eventually to be stitched back together and wasn't on the HDU until about midnight. I finally saw DS mid- morningish.

Nobody suggested I try and express overnight and I was in no fit state to have any ideas of my own. SCBU nurse was a cow about it and seemed to dislike me so then everything I did was wrong. She insisted I hold DS a particular way for feeding and it just wasn't working for us. He was eventually let out of SCBU later that day, I continued to struggle to feed and then when I finally got him latched on and feeding I was interrupted because they wanted to move us out of the room we were in and on to the ward - guilt tripped me about it in fact, even though I asked them to wait while I finished the feed.

Went home three or four days later, next day the midwife came out, expressed surprise the hospital hadn't weighed him before discharge, weighed him herself and we were straight back in for a week because he'd lost 12.5%. That was all weird as well as at this point he was clearly feeding well - really well - and they kept making me feed then express, then they'd try and feed him the expressed milk even though he clearly didn't want or need more. The day before they discharged DS they were expressing concern about his lack of weight gain and saying maybe we should try a bottle, then the next day he was fine and had suddenly put on the required amount of weight. The weights they recorded did not add up and it was suggested off the record by one of the midwives that at some point (possibly when he was born!) they'd weighed him wrong.

This was 2013 and it really seemed like nobody knew what anyone else was doing and the advice given to me was often contradictory. And that was with no language barrier and DH and/or my parents there to back me up and ask the questions I didn't think of pretty much constantly through daylight hours.

I feel very very compassionate for the parents actually . Fucking horrible thing to happen

But the NHS is in crisis and the overworked and underfunded wards exist . English speaking women also fall victim to this as evidenced here

Had this poor lady spoken English and had been given the means to educate herself she would have bought in formula and done some research beforehand

I don’t think feeling compassion for the parents and accepting the state of the NHS are mutually exclusive

Really bad shit happens all the time and some people sue and some don’t

I also pity the child the most - he is the victim here

I also find it very sad that 8 years on the Mum still needs a translator - which is a crying shame given the needs of her child and her ongoing reliance on the NHS

On principle I am averse to people during the NHS - as they need the money . We can express that opinion without being called a racist and cruel

stopfuckingshoutingatme yes the child is the victim - he is the one who the court case was brought for, he is the one receiving the money. The money is to ensure that his needs are met for the rest of his life.

The NHS is in crisis and it people are overworked and wards underfunded and in this instance it led to a series of events that left a boy severely brain damaged

Had they not been so busy someone might have noticed and intervened

And had the mother (and father) known a bit more they could have intervened too and just got in some formula

It’s a tragic cocktail of events and if the money looks after the child well that seems fair

@stopfuckingshoutingatme I can see why you need that username. Have you even bothered reading posts from the people on this thread? It's even affecting the (gasp) English people who are prepared.

Because she only knew a few basic words of English, she was never given proper instructions about how to feed her son

And thats why she didn't feed him for 15 hour stretches? She had no idea babies needed to be fed because she doesn't speak english?

Had this poor lady spoken English and had been given the means to educate herself she would have bought in formula and done some research beforehand

This seems a big assumption on your part stopfuckingshouting. Well educated, English speaking women still sometimes inadvertently manage to starve their babies due to breastfeeding problems. We have had examples of this given in the thread.

And yes I agree, we can't afford these lawsuits, so let's offer better care to the most vulnerable members of society, tiny newborns who literally cannot help themselves, and their mums who have just been through one of the most difficult experiences a human body can go through.

And she did know she needed to feed him. That's why she was so panicked. She literally couldn't. What's with the not-reading?

Slievenamon she knew the baby needed feeding and she knew he wasn't, that's why she and her husband asked repeatedly for help and requested the baby wasn't discharged.

The parents won’t be rich from this. It will literally just cover what they need for his care and just to get them back to the point of wealth they would’ve been at if they had a healthy child and both parents could work.

If the nhs can't afford payouts they need to not fuck up. I'm a massive supporter of the nhs, but not enough to martyr myself/my child to it in this circumstance.

If you read the judgment as well she suffered with the birth - they admitted he should have been born via c section 4 hours earlier.

Some people honestly don’t know how to look after newborns. I worked as a midwife (ok, this was 25 years ago) and I would look after ladies who had never held a baby, hadn’t attended ante-natal classes, thought it was ok to let a sleeping babe be and not feed them.

She should have been offered a translator, sometimes in our clinics we stayed behind 1-2 hours waiting for the translator to come so our patient got the best care we could give. Both mother and baby have been let down.

One last thing and I'll stop ranting, but as for the snide remarks about language skills, get over yourself. Not everyone can learn new languages well (I spent years trying and failing), and I imagine it's much harder if you're housebound looking after a disabled child and presumably don't get out too much. I wouldn't be leaping to make it my priority either.

(You've succeeded in sounding like a total goady arsehole by the way, so if that was what you were going for, bravo.)