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!

@Charolais
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

Are you for real?

Her 'Doctor Spock' translated into Tamil would have told her to notify the nurses if she had any concerns.

Or possibly it would have told her how to cure tongue tie all by herself using the plastic cutlery on the ward.

Or maybe exactly where the kitchen was so that she could then locate everything she would need to prepare a bottle of formula.

Even when her husband repeatedly asked the midwives in English about the problem they were met with insults to their instincts and intelligence.

It is indeed extremely ugly, TeisanLap.

greendale17 Sat 14-Apr-18 04:06:37
Where the hell was her English fluent speaking huband in all of this????

He was standing at the nurses' station asking repeatedly about the obvious problem and getting patronised.

Of course the judge made the right decision.

The poor woman did know her baby needed to be fed. She tried to breastfeed. The child couldn't latch or feed properly.

Her husband who speaks some English repeatedly requested help and was told 'babies cry'.

Mirri I agree. If a newborn on the postnatal ward is inconsolable even after being breastfed, a bottle of formula/bank breastmilk should be tried.

It would be a quick way to establish if there are problems with breastfeeding, placate a hungry newborn and buy a bit of time to get breastfeeding support in.

@PussCatTheGoldfish

"If a newborn on the postnatal ward is inconsolable even after being breastfed, a bottle of formula/bank breastmilk should be tried.
It would be a quick way to establish if there are problems with breastfeeding, placate a hungry newborn and buy a bit of time to get breastfeeding support in."

Whilst I don't disagree with you, when the midwife finally agreed to try my three day-old daughter with a small cup of formula and she wolfed it down, the midwife's response was to call my daughter a "piglet" and to say she was "manipulating" me because she was greedy. So, even then, the ward staff didn't direct me to more breastfeeding support because they have preferred to believe that my baby was manipulative than that we were having trouble establishing bf.

Even in 2009 they checked baby had been fed before leaving and where signs up in many different languages for a wide range of things in the maternity units they where also more than happy to shove bottles at unsuccessfully trying to breastfeed mums.

In 2001 no one checked my baby had been successfully fed before discharge, or weighed him. And he was a premature, low birth weight baby, who’d been tube fed and in an incubator. I repeated asked, in my native English, in a Scottish hospital if I could bottle feed breast milk and was told I couldn’t.

After we went home, I was repeatedly back at the hospital with dry nappies because my baby was not feeding. I knew to watch for the dry nappies because he was 4 week’s old by the time he went home.

I’m sorry because I know that there are many excellent and very caring HCPs in the NHS, but there are also far too many who are incompetent and simply don’t give a toss. I find it heartbreaking what has happened to this family and their little boy, but I don’t find it surprising.

www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2018/716.html&query=(Rajatheepan)

Here is the full report of the case

There are some truly awful posts in this thread. People blaming Mum with no back ground knowledge of the case. A number of you should be utterly ashamed of yourselves.

@Seeingadistance

The staff on the postnatal ward after my c-section forgot to observe me on the first night and they also forgot to give me the injection that I was meant to be given to prevent blood clots (they turned up the next morning and said "oops, you've got to have this NOW because we should have given it to you over 12 hours ago" ). One of the midwives told me that she was very sorry and that it was unacceptable but that they were just so short-staffed and exhausted that mistakes were inevitable . If staff are stretched so thin that they're forgetting to provide necessary meds, then it's not surprising if they're also too busy to check whether babies are actually feeding properly. Especially if there's also an ideological element of refusal to believe that bf isn't always easy (I'm very pro-bf but, if it came easily to all first-time mums, lactation consultancy wouldn't be as big as it is).

I can totally believe it too. Me/my babies had feeding issues too. I was told to ‘top up’ DD with formula as my milk was v slow to come in after emergency c/s. That would’ve been v hard to understand if you weren’t English speaking as we used a little cup. With DS he couldn’t feed & I expressed but thankfully had a great midwife in the hospital who assisted me. Some m/ws couldn’t give a crap though, if you got one of them and there was a language barrier, then I can see that major problems could arise.

cory my son had hypotonia too at birth but it was spotted very quickly. Thankfully it was just ‘one of those things’ and he grew out of it (he did have a barrage of tests at a few days old). He couldn’t suckle hence us going into bottles quickly, although I tried bf for a couple of days it was not happening. He took forever to finish a bottle feed so there is no way he would’ve been able to b/f.

andthislittlepiggywent1
at 'manipulating'/'piglet'/'greedy'.
Though I well know there are bone-ignorant women out there.
I shared a semi-private room with anther mother and her baby after DD1 was born (in the US). I overheard her describing her beautiful 9lb 6oz baby girl as 'greedy' over the phone to a friend.

ExMIL and exH also considered babies to be 'manipulative'.

I spent a further 5 days in hospital after having dd before I could go home. I couldn't breastfeed due to meds I was on and I had to rely on the hospital bringing me ready made baby bottles as i was being kept in a private intensive care room and they didn't allow me to bring in my own formula until I went up to the maternity ward.

Basically I would ask for a bottle. An hour later I would have to ask again as they didn't bring it. Now my baby was screaming in hunger. I would ask in advance whilst she slept to make sure she wasn't fussing when she woke. But they were late every time sometimes not remembering for nearly 2 hours. They were horrible when they finally did bring the milk and made me feel so bad for asking. I was only trying to feed my newborn. I was so glad to get up to the maternity ward where I could make my own instead. Thing is it's not as if they weren't there, they were coming in hourly to take my blood pressure but would always say I'll be back with milk. Then didn't turn up for an hour again. My baby ended up losing weight because of this.

That is heartbreaking.
Of course there should be compensation to provide care.
Of course lessons should be learned.
Not sure what else to say. .
Yabu for reading the mail?

@HotButteryToast if you don't specialise in clinical negligence then you shouldn't give your opinion on the basis of your being a lawyer because the truth is you don't know any better than a lay person.

The test for clinical negligence is difficult to meet. The vast majority of claims fail. And any judge knows that a ruling they've made to fit their opinions rather than the facts will be appealed and likely overturned. Judges aren't risking their professional reputations and the entire foundation on which our legal system is based because they feel sorry for people.

My Dd was born with a cleft palate and so literally couldn't feed.
She was my fifth child and I repeatedly told the staf that she wasn't right and that she was only having about half an ounce each feed which was taking an hour.
I also noticed something strange about her throat but was told it was her tonsils.
I was fobbed off by all midwives and two drs.
We took her home and obviously the next day she was jaundiced. Dh and I started to feed her from a spoon.
Mw came and said "she's fine"
On day 4 a luck mw came and was extremely concerned and very thorough. She rang to get her readmitted but while she was weighing her she spotted the cleft.
She also later developed pneumonia from aspirating through trying to feed.
The whole thing was a cock up from start to finish and I could have made a massive complaint.
Luckily my Dd was fine eventually but I would have had she been permanently damaged.
My sister is a nurse and told me that the hospital put on loads of extra training as a result of this and people were spoken to sternly and that was enough for me.

Some posters should be ashamed of themselves after reading this thread

@andthislittlepiggywent1

That's terrible! Some people should never go into caring professions. The trouble is it's so hard to say something at that stage. The mum is so vulnerable.

I crap I was told with my slow to thrive first (2009) ranged from don't top up, do top up and the almost inevitable 'you're not trying hard enough'.
In the 70s my mum was told my dbro would end up brain damaged if she didn't FF him.

*The crap, not I crap . A lot of the advice was just so contradictory.

She could communicate perfectly well through the partner

Her partner wasn’t there!! He left.

To be fair I know someone who had a baby at that hospital around the same time and she described it as a neglectful and traumatic experience. There weren't enough midwifes and both her and her baby nearly died after her birth partner was repeatedly ignored when they said something was wrong. She had home births after that. They were obviously understaffed and struggling.

The hospital should have arranged a translater, how could they be sure a new mum would know what to do?

Unfortunately there is a child at the centre of all of this with brain damage because of something so avoidable, it's dreadful.

I'm sure the mum knew babies need food but probably not how often, how long, how to tell if proper latch, what to do if milk not coming in, that hungry babies don't necessarily cry as they may be too sleepy....
Even if they couldn't understand each other, they could have observed feeding more closely before discharge.

@Catspaws

Chap called Denning might have begged to differ.

After my experience with trying to establish BF in 2005 with our first DC I totally believe this. The midwives I saw varied from totally amazing to a total fucking shower of uncaring incompetence. I was 15 years older than the mother in this case, English is my native language and I have 2 degrees in a science directly related to medicine, and still struggled when dealing with the HCPs who weren’t listening to us. It was the awesome, caring ones who got us through.

I've had 3 babies and the post natal support for feeding has been poor every single time. My first two were around the time that poor woman had her baby, the height of the 'breast is best, we aren't going to even tell you how to bottle feed'. I felt totally overwhelmed and shocked by the whole experience and if I hadn't been able to access information myself readily, I don't know what I would have done.

Post natal care is shocking in this country. My last birth, the clearly very inexperienced teenager across from me got tutted at when she didn't know how to bottle feed her baby. She got more attention from the Bounty woman, who promptly conned her into spending hundreds of pounds on new baby photos.