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!

Wizzywig - Hindi is a language that is spoken in India - not Sri Lanka. So no, she would not have understood Hindi.

I don’t understand how anybody can disbelieve this happening.

First of all it’s the Daily Mail reporting that the mum didn’t know that her baby needed to be fed.

I’m willing to bet all the money I have that that statement is a lie.

The mother in question is from a country where breastfeeding is overwhelmingly the norm, she will have full well known that a baby needs to be fed and tried to feed her son. What she might not have known about, in her own country are things like tongue tie, milk just not coming in. Or maybe she did know about these things and because the midwives failed to get an interpreter in for her, she couldn’t articulate her worries. She knew something was wrong, the judge acknowledged that fact. She and her son suffered in a terrible way because she was dismissed.

I failed to be able to breastfeed my daughter, even when I asked a midwife to check for tongue tie (which it turns out she did have), I was dismissed. I didn’t have the confidence, as a new mother, to challenge what I suspected was wrong so just switched to formula feeding. I’m happy enough with that, as my own choice, I suppose. This lady was/is a vulnerable woman, a rufugee who deserved better treatment than she and her son got.

I feel terribly sorry for the family.

It's incredibly sad for the little boy but I fail to see what difference an interpreter would have made here. Her partner was fluent in English. Surely to goodness if you have a breast fed crying baby you would try bottle feeding to make sure they aren't just hungry?
Seems to be a lack of common sense and instinct here on the mothers part.
The fact she was poor and from Sri Lanka is not relevant.
She could communicate perfectly well through the partner, very well enough to be able to raise a legal claim against the NHS actually.

If I had a child I would put him to my nipple to feed him. I don't know how to do it! Is he latching on? Is he actually feeding? I don't know!

This poor mother - the big post above makes it clear that she attempted to breastfeed, but was not given any instruction how to do it, how to get baby to latch, how to know if baby was not latching. That last part seems important - she didn't know that the baby wasn't latching, and so was not getting what he needed.

This was a huge failure by that particular trust and they should be held responsible. It could have been averted multiple times during the mother and baby's time in the hospital.

I knew something wasn’t right about my baby’s feeding but was dismissed every time. Even after my baby had been taken to SCBU, the NHS breastfeeding advisor only came round for ten minute slots and said things looked fine. Then we’d have another 20 hours of misery and crying. It was another nurse who told me about nipple shields which also helped get breastfeeding actually happening. The help with feeding was lacking at every level, from the most serious (in the first 18 hours when my baby became hypoglycaemic) to the less critical (when we were in transitional care or at home with HV saying it was fine when he still actually wasn’t latching: at this point I could have switched to bottle feeding so while it was no help it wasn’t a matter of life or death).

I feel so sorry for this woman, her husband and her child. We are lucky this doesn’t happen more often based on the very patchy care I and others here have experienced.

Failing

She was new to the country when she had her baby. 8 years on she has learnt some lessons about how immigrants who don’t have a voice, in the worst possible way.

This has really shocked me simply because its brought back what happened to me with my first baby, I was discharged over a bank holiday, I'd been in hospital 4 days and she hadn't fed all that time, constantly screaming. I had the La Leche league counsellor in, she couldn't help so I was told to try to pump it was literally just blood coming out but anything vaguely like milk I gave it to her with a teaspoon mixed with boiled water so we are talking less than 5 mls of fluid 2 or 3 times a day. By the time the community midwife got to me my DD was almost too weak to feed and was basically starving. One of the other woman in my NCT group her baby nearly died under similar circumstances. I dont think I can write anymore about it, just shocked by people who think the woman should have known or could have done anything about it.

Has the OP been back to comment on this thread? I can't see it.

Feel like adding anything, OP?

Mirri

Look up the formula feeding rates in Sri Lanka. It’s non-existent. This woman expected to breastfeed her baby, knew something was wrong and through lack of duty of care was neither advised as to how to continue breastfeeding or the alternatives.

This is not the place to rage against “breast is best”, which it is by the way, when measuring entire populations.

I formula fed my daughter, fyi.

It is bloody hard to get any sort of resolution to a medical negligence claim, as they tie them up for as long as possible, repeatedly sending the evidence to new experts, and round and round it goes. Particularly for cerebral palsy. Most cases there isn't enough admissible evidence of causation.
Dd2 is 14 and was brain damaged at birth. Has CP as a result (lack of monitoring, so they did not know she was hypoxic. ) Case still ongoing. There must have been evidence in this case, because these cases are usually impossible to close. (Indeed in our case, even though there is very little doubt as to what happened, as the actual negligence was the lack of monitoring, that means there is no evidence as to at what point action should have been taken (and wasn't) in order to prove causation.

Not St Georges though.

Lost the Op again.

I get about one letter a year telling me they have instructed a different expert. I'm astonished that this has made it court and a ruling and the child is only 8. They must have a fabulous team.

Charolais Sat 14-Apr-18 00:26:50
"I had gave birth at age 21 in the U.S. with no support. I bought Dr. Benjamin Spock’s 'Baby and Child Care' book. My son did great. In the U.S. there are no home health visitors and all that, your on your own.

This woman had nine months to prepare. She could have got a hold of a book in her own language. The U.K. has become a nanny state and the NHS is being destroyed."

I have read Dr Spock repeatedly: there is nothing in there about a baby like mine who was unable to suckle due to (undiagnosed) hypotonia. Not a word. There was nothing about it in any of the other multiple baby books I bought, either.

Baby books tend to assume that there won't be a problem with feeding. I had read a range of them and they all blithely seemed to assume that as long as you were committed to breastfeeding and the latch was right, nothing could go wrong: you just had to succeed. We didn't. Like other posters on this thread, my baby ended up malnourished on a hospital ward. It was only 10 years later that somebody explained to me that this was a natural consequence of the genetic condition she had just been diagnosed with! A diagnosis we got after years of trying to raise concerns.

Besides, the woman was a refugee. There may or there may not be suitable books in her language, but where would she buy one?

My apologies Mirri, I misread, we’re on the same page.

Remembering my experience, as a native English speaker in my midtwenties, I can only too easily see how this could happen. When I had my first DS 7 years ago, the midwives in the hospital were terrible.

When I would ask them every 3 hours or so to hand me DS (EMCS) and to help me latch him, they would flat our refuse stating he only needed feeding every 6-8 hours (!) and only helping if enough time had went past. They also weren't showing me how to latch DS and instead would grab my breast and shove it in his mouth.

When DS was 2 days old he spent the entire day screaming, his lips were all dry and cracked. The midwives still refused to help insisting he wasn't hungry, and that some babies just scream a lot for no reason.

It wasn't until I was out of the hospital and a community midwife showed me how to latch him, told me to feed him every 2 hours (he had lost 13%) that DS stopped screaming and started sleeping and gain g weight.

It still makes me so sad thinking of how hungry he must have been those first few days.

This poor woman and her baby were severely let down.

Mirri

I don’t understand your point.

If a midwife has the time to look at a baby, see that it’s distressed, talk to the mother, go off make up a bottle of formula, come back and try feeding the bottle....

...then they’ve got time to provide breastfeeding support.

The issue is that midwives don’t have time. They don’t want to notice crying babies - that means stopping and doing something. They certainly don’t want to be wasting time sterilising bottles and making up feeds. Much easier to say ‘oh just put him to the breast’ And leave. Or in this case ‘babies cry, he’s fine’.

Where the hell was her English fluent speaking huband in all of this????

My first thoughts on reading the newspaper were how on earth are people to be believe that a woman from somewhere like Sri Lanka didn’t know how to feed a baby. Families live together, children help bring up children.

There has to be more to this.

she returned two or three times to the midwife station, on each occasion without being able to attract the attention of any of the midwives on duty. She said that noone was paying her any attention

I can totally relate to that!

why the first course of action is not to try a bottle to see if that satisfies the child?
I just don't understand why this isn't a standard practice, other than the NHS preferring to pressurise mothers to breastfeed ONLY

There is always the choice of the mother too.

I would not have wanted or agreed to my newborn being given a bottle of formula as 'standard practice' at all. There are other, reliable signs of problems/dehydration.

And it's not a case of no harm done if they drink a bottle of formula on day 1 but then that wasn't even the reason for crying - it can seriously interfere with bf for tiny babies.

Reading between the lines it seems that staff assumed that due to her background she'd be a confident breastfeeder without actually taking time to check

I realise I’ve assumed that myself but it’s also what made me think there has to be more to this.

Also, the way it’s been reported in the press. It’s as someone said previously - immigrants getting millions in compensation. The press also say the baby hadn’t been fed whilst more than likely deliberately forgetting to say - mum had tried to feed the baby but the baby wouldn’t feed.

It’s extremely ugly.