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!

It apparently is demonstrably the NHS's fault though, the people in charge of figuring that out say it is and they don't give out cash for the fun of it, and the money is compensation to help care for the child (as has been written up thread).

Of course if the only message taken away is "stupid foreigners", rather than "holy shit our approach to childbirth is haphazard and not good enough", then that's much better for the powers that be.

I'm an English-speaking mother who went to NHS antenatal classes and still didn't know how to feed DC1 - turned out DC had tongue-tie and a) that wasn't covered at the antenatal classes, and b) DC1 could have spent ages on the breast and yet failed to thrive as no-one picked up on the tongue-tie, so while my baby would "suckle" at the breast, she wasn't actually swallowing anything. DC2, I totally knew what to look for to check it was going in. DC1, not so much. So I can believe a mother "did not know how to feed her baby". I raised my concerns with the midwife on duty and was utterly dismissed, and it was only when the shifts changed and I tried again that the next midwife took my concerns that DD was crying with hunger seriously. Really wish I had had my head together enough to complain about the first midwife on duty as she was appalling: "babies cry, get used to it", or words to that effect.

I think there is too much emphasis on the mother in this story. The fact is that the baby was a patient in the hospital, having just been born. He was discharged without having eaten anything in his life. Regardless of whether or not the staff could communicate with the mother he shouldn't have been allowed home without first making sure he could either breast or bottle feed, failing that tube feeding.

It's terribly sad for the baby.

The money will need to be used to look after him for the rest of his life.

I know the NHS are at fault but what mother would leave a baby 12-15 hours without feeding them? It doesn't take a health professional to say. If she's been eating and drinking herself in those 15 hours, why wouldn't she feed her baby?

Desperately sad story.
For what it's worth, DD, born at home perfectly healthy was admitted to NICU on day 4 with 16% body weight loss. Why? Because she wasn't getting enough milk from me and when I kept flagging it as she was crying 24/7, the midwives dismissed it airily as "all newborns cry"
If it wasn't for my dogged insistence that they come and check her again and again I may have ended up in similar boat.
Dismissive attitude to young mothers sucks whatever language they speak.

The mum tried to let the midwives know she thought there was a problem, they fobbed her off. Of course they should he held accountable.

I'm pretty sure I remember not being allowed out of hospital until my babies had wee'd and pood. Am I imagining that?

But I'm just thinking, "how can you not know how to feed your baby?" Unless she was bottle feeding, I suppose.

What juniorcakeoff said.

I was undecided about BF or FF. went into labour at 37 weeks with first child.
No siblings. No parental experience. Horrendous back to back labour, 72 hours, 48 with no sleep.
Exhausted. Ended up with epidural (topped up twice) and forceps after a failed ventousse and literally no decent food other than mouthfuls of cereal bars and I threw most of those back up.

I’d waited for years to be a parent but for the first 24 hours remembering who I was let alone what I was supposed to do was impossible. I was on a ward with far more coherent women. I was so hungry. 5 hours post birth I was allowed to walk to the lunch trolley in the communal room. I’m a vegetarian. They could offer me nothing but tuna salad (not vegetarian!!) so I was without food again till 5pm.

I started getting more lucid. My baby was very perfect, she wasn’t alert at all. How easy this parenting thing is! Maybe I ought to feed her? I felt like I was coming round from the worlds worst hangover, so I asked
when she was meant to eat They said she was ‘sleepy’ from the pethadine i’d had. She’d been born 12 hours.

At 18 hours (and exhausted but with it!) I insisted I had help and they gave me a disposable bottle of aptimil. They told me I’d be discharged at 8am. She threw the milk up and no one helped or explained what I should do. I barely saw a ward midwife.

They spent 30 minutes talking to me about contraception and 5 about feeding her.

If my community midwife hadn’t have come to my rescue I think I’d have had real problems

This was 2007.

surely it should be the responsibility of the patient to bring a relative or friend who can speak English

of course, Tamil refugees are bound to have somebody with them who can speak good English

Babies may not need "milk" immediately but they do need colostrum, and premature babies need more. You can also be producing lots of colostrum but if your baby can't or won't latch , or briefly latches then falls asleep, you've got no fucking chance. New babies are so so vulnerable and first time mothers are discharged too early without a proper community midwifery safety net.

I should think she probably was feeding, i.e. holding the baby to the breast if he/she was awake. A jaundiced, dehydrated, starving baby is quite likely to be very quiet and sleepy - lots of people will tell you that a hungry baby will cry and you can follow those cues, it's not necessarily true. You can't follow your instincts with jaundice, you need advice and support. Speaking as a well-educated English speaking mother whose son was readmitted after 4 weeks having apparently fed regularly, losing weight and still jaundiced after birth.

If the facts are as stated it really is bonkers. Here we have the idea that immigrants entirely lose their own agency when they arrive in a new country. And further, when these immigrants are wholly incompetent at the most basic of elements of living, it is the fault of their host country.

It's a bizarre attitude that is increasingly prevalent in the UK. A nanny state combined with a self-flagellation about how we owe the world's citizens a duty of care.

I can see how it could happen. I struggled to feed and was in hospital for at least 3 days while they monitored and tried to help (some midwives were nice others made me cry or ignored me). I was desperate to leave and had to fight for a discharge but I was only allowed out on the condition I agreed to a fairly complicated regime of expressing, forumula top-ups and home visits every other day for weighing. I was confused as hell and my baby and I were both miserable. Staff must have known she was more vulnerable because of the language barrier and she should have been supported and listened to.

The child hadn't fed for 15hrs, but what I've not seen reported is if the mother was continuing to try to feed unsuccessfully.

When I had DD she didn't feed for several hours. That wasn't because I didn't try, nor did the staff not try either. She ended up in NICU on a tube. I was off it on whatever they'd given me post c-section so don't really know how long and she'd gone blue twice before I'd come out of recovery so thankfully the staff were very attentive. If they hadn't been then god knows what would have happened to DD.

Whilst it's absolutely tragic this poor little boy has to live with conditions he wouldn't otherwise have had, why is it up to the midwives to have been able to communicate in any language other than that of the country they live/work in? This refugee couple didn't just wake up one day to find themselves in England, they would have had a long, planned journey, and should have made attempts to learn the language in the time until they got here, or the time since. To expect to be able to get on in a country without knowing the language is just stupid, and if they had enough about them to escape an awful country to save themselves why didn't they learn key words?

But I'm just thinking, "how can you not know how to feed your baby?"

The baby has to know, and be capable, as well. If the baby has no sucking reflex then how are you going to successfully breast feed them without significant help from midwives? It's hard to successfully breast feed in those circumstances even if you all speak English.

If you are bottle feeding, you have to understand the written or verbal instructions.

junior why didn't you know that he needed to feed? Not attacking you, just trying to understand.

It's the Fail OP, and it's about a brown refugee, so of course there's going to be more to it than what they report.

I can remember being in the recovery room after my CS, and hearing the person next door being absolutely incredulous when the midwife told them that her baby would feed at least every 3 hours. She had literally no idea - if she hadn't spoken English, would she have only fed them 3 times a day and wondered why the baby cried all the time?

Some people are completely unprepared and unsupported.

Poor women - only 21 with no support (it sounds like) not able to speak English and not assertive enough to kick up a fuss (article says she'd smile) she fell under the radar.

Have people bothered reading others experiences written on this very thread?

Incredibly articulate, intelligent, confident English speakers apparently have struggled with this, not just vulnerable refugees.

It's not because some ungrateful sods didn't bother to learn the language of their new country, it's at least partly because some midwives ignored them and the baby.

Un-fucking-believable.

Sounds very believable to me.

When DS2 was born, he was very sleepy, I put him to the breast but he wasn’t sucking properly. I didn’t have the experience with breastfeeding to know that he wasn’t feeding properly, and because he was so sleepy I didn’t have a screaming baby as a clue that something was wrong with the feeding. I thought he must be getting enough milk because he was setting to sleep after a “feed”. Very poor nappy output, but again, I didn’t have the experience of a brand new newborn to realise just how important that was (DS1 was a bottle fed premature baby who was in neonatal unit for his first few weeks).

Fortunately the midwife in charge of the ward was paying enough attention to be concerned about the nappies and noticed DS2’s jaundice before his blood sugars had dropped low enough to cause any damage.
Turned out he’d been too sleepy to feed because he was very jaundiced. A course of phototherapy and top up feeds soon perked him right up.

But from that experience, I can easily imagine how a combination of an inexperienced new mother, staff too busy to pay good attention to the situation or to listen properly to the mothers concerns, and language barriers, could lead to this sort of outcome.

Well Isodora, for a start she was from Sri Lanka not Somalia. See how easy it is for information to be misinterpreted?

Last year there was a nasty case (medical, not court) where a whole family died in hospital because no one could communicate with them.

This, incredibly, was in London - every nationality on the planet from the hospital staff and friends tried to find out where they were from.

The family were so ill by the time they were admitted (at speed, into ITU) that talk of any kind was pretty hopeless, let alone having 500 diff languages tried at them. No one could identify a very fast-moving disease with no context or background eg where they'd been on holiday or what they'd eaten.

They would have probably died even if they had been able to give doctors any relevant info. The point remains that the NHS do go over and above the call of duty the whole time.