Baby dies in childbirth. Parents not allowed to take body home.

[RedToothBrush]

What has the UK become?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-48907130?__twitter_impression=TRUE
NHS fees: 'Couple couldn't take baby's body home'

Charging overseas patients for NHS care in England must be suspended until it is clear it is not harming women, the Royal College of Midwives has said.

A couple whose baby died following an emergency Caesarean were not given the body as they were unable to pay £10,000 in medical fees, one doctor has said.

Joe Rylands said the expansion of charging had caused "disbelief" among many colleagues.

The Department of Health said the charges had raised £1.3bn since 2015.

In 2018, Dr Rylands was working in a maternity hospital when a woman from Western Europe on holiday in the UK came in - she was eight months pregnant and had started bleeding. Obstetricians performed an emergency Caesarean but the baby died.

When she and her partner were recovering on a ward, they were interviewed by an overseas visitors manager, in charge of billing.

Because they did not have a valid European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) they were told they had to pay £10,000 for the care they received - which they could not do.

It's telling that people are only seeing this in terms of finance and not humanity

I'm doubting the veracity of the story.

I wonder why the baby died, the UK has got a shocking stillbirth rate. If I felt there were inadequacies in the care I recieved then I would refuse to pay a penny even if I could. I bet there was no investigation into the circumstances of the baby's death before the parents were billed.

DpWm Wed 10-Jul-19 12:46:12
You'd expect this sort of thing in America,. Not here. Fucking Tory government.

I heard of a case (one of many similar) in America where a British couple had a premature baby but the ICU would have cost them £1million. They had to find a million quid or let the baby die.
Right wing capitalist ideology. Thanks

Some parts of america are 'aborting' babies after birth so i'm not surprised.

Mayday Repatriation might not be essential but funerals aren't cheap in this country either.

Driving the baby home is hardly possible though!

But nhs tourists come here to get free health care while they’re here eg an operation or lengthy treatment for a known condition while on a work visa, which takes planning, but I still don’t understand how this woman was an nhs tourist as no one would choose for any of that to happen to them even if it were for free.

I used to work for an undertaker, and the cost of repatriating a body ran into thousands. And presumably this couple didn't have insurance and wanted the NHS to pay.

There is always a story in between the lines. You can't judge until you've heard the full version.

I could drive from London to several European capitals as quickly as I could drive to the capital of Scotland. I don't know if legal but I would be tempted to do it to bring my baby home. Some undertakers offer reduced cost services for stillborn or neo natal deaths. The hospital itself would have a chapel and the ability to cremate the baby, returning the ashes to the parents.
After the baby ashes scandal in Scotland I am less trusting of the hospital "doing the right thing" than I would have been before.
And I think the finance people at the hospital being grabbing and unkind is just as possible a story as the parents being healthcare "tourists".

MyDC you seem to agree with the action taken in keeping the body of the baby, is that right?
No of course not, I just think having no insurance if holidaying at 8 months pregnant is extremely irresponsible.

I had a distant family member who died abroad. They wouldn't release the body until they had confirmation from insurance company that they'd be paid.
It took about a week for it all to be confirmed- we were told that without that confirmation, we wouldn't have been able to repatriate the body.

Get travel insurance.

If you were overseas they will have billed you - there's British people stuck in hospitals not allowed to leave until they pay

Mayday it's still repatriation though, and still requires a huge amount of paperwork and associated costs (you can't even cross a county boundary without incurring costs and paperwork).

I would put money in this being far more of an issue than the cost of the care the woman received.

Neither article mentions repatriation though, it’s just about releasing the baby’s body in a bassinet. So it is about the cost of the woman’s treatment not about the potential cost of repatriation.

It's telling that people are only seeing this in terms of finance and not humanity.

Isn't it just?

just as possible a story as the parents being healthcare "tourists"

There's really no reason for someone in Western Europe to go to the UK to give birth as a 'health care tourist'. It simply makes no sense.

Travelling without insurance is stupid but in health care terms it's neither here nor there if you're eligible for an EHIC card. Again stupid not to have one, but if you failed to get your shit together before travelling it doesn't mean that you have to pay out of pocket and that's it.

Where I live we occasionally have people come over on a holiday, take drugs, die, and then their poor parents/families/friends sometimes need to crowdfund to repatriate their bodies. That's what you'd better have travel insurance for. Obviously out of respect I'm not going to link but one tragic case was widely reported because it involved two people at once.

Punishing the baby for the mistakes of the parents is wildly unethical

This is a nonsense statement, the baby is deceased and cannot be punished.

If the true story is to do with repatriation, the NHS can’t just hand a body over without the a plan and paperwork confirming that plan surely? The parents best solution would be as PP suggested, a service in the UK and a cremation, taking the ashes home. When we lost our baby we were surprised to find that the funeral home offered an almost free burial/cremation, we didn’t realise until about the 4th/5th we visited and actually asked about costs.

Sorry HerRoyalNotness

@HerRoyalNotness and hugs

Karwomannghia The article doesn't mention repatriation, no, but I think it's been written in a way to deliberately cause "outrage".

The article mentions the bassinet in a separate paragraph to the body being released and the bill referred to doesn't explicitly say that it was for treatment as they have used [ ].

Some parts of america are 'aborting' babies after birth so i'm not surprised.

Where’s that then, Eliza? Sounds like anti-choice propaganda

*I bet it's nowhere near as black & white as that article makes out.

It does cost £Ks and masses of paperwork to repatriate a body, whoever you are, wherever you are.*

Exactly. You can't just give someone a dead baby to take home and hop on a flight with it in the hand baggage. There's a lot more to this story.

Appalling stuff. I live in Mexico and a few years ago, a UK friend had a heart attack while working here and was treated in a private hospital. They "released" him at ten in the morning but, for some reason, didn't accept his insurance, so then refused to let him out of the hospital until late at night, while his friends ran around trying to sort the situation out.

A health institution doing something like that to someone who has just had a heart attack? And there are people here cheering the NHS going down the same route?

And we do have public health care here where he would have been treated for next to nothing, even being a foreigner.

If the baby hadn't died, would they have kept the baby??? Presumably no. They would have thought of something else

Well exactly. It is THEIR baby. Who the fuck do they think they are. By al means send a bill to the grieving parents . But you don't kidnap a baby's body.

For anyone saying ‘well they do it in other countries’

I dont care! Other countries do all sorts of shitty things...its not bloody tit for tat...we don’t have to join in with them

Surely it's more likely that there were no proper arrangements in place for proper storage and repatriation. So the only thing the hospital can do is keep the baby. Until suitable arrangements are made

Definitely this. Apologies for being blunt but you can't just handover human remains and say ta ta.

The babies cadaver can only be released through a proper process. And as other PP have said repatriation has significant costs.

The newspaper article is wide of the mark.

Surely it's more likely that there were no proper arrangements in place for proper storage and repatriation. So the only thing the hospital can do is keep the baby. Until suitable arrangements are made

Makes sense