A MIDWIFE has told an inquest investigating the death of a baby girl that there was a “difficult” atmosphere on the labour ward on the night the child was born.
Amelia Amber Sweetpea Clyde-Smith suffered brain damage and died 33 days after she was born in 2018, with senior health officials previously apologising to her parents, saying the death was “probably” avoidable.
That apology followed an investigation by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which found there had been “missed opportunities”.
The inquest, which began on Monday 8 April and is due to last until Friday 12 April, previously heard that Ewelina Clyde-Smith’s pregnancy had progressed well until her waters broke around two weeks before her due date, after which she came to the Hospital with her husband, Dominic.
After their daughter was born, she was transported to the UK in order to receive specialist care but later died.
The night before Amelia was born, Catherine Richardson, who was the labour ward co-ordinator on that set of night shifts, left the Hospital to visit a friend who was having a home birth – leaving someone who was not a co-ordinator in charge of a ward containing high-risk patients – the inquest heard.
Testifying at the inquest yesterday, Lee-Ann Davies Storer, one of the midwives working on the maternity ward that night, described how the incident had affected the team.
But she told the inquest that “conversations had happened with various management that the events of the night before weren’t relevant to the night in question”.
Despite not mentioning the fact Ms Richardson left the ward in the statement she wrote for the Health Department’s serious incident review in 2018, she made a contemporaneous note of the incident when she was at home. She then supplied this to the inquest yesterday.
“I felt like it [Ms Richardson’s departure from the ward] had an impact on that [following] night shift and that is why I wanted to remember it,” she said.
Describing the next night, when Amelia was born, Ms Davies Storer told the inquest: “The atmosphere was quite difficult at the start of the shift.
“It was very tense. It was like an elephant in the room.”
But the team got on with their work, she said.
Asked by the relief coroner why she had not included this episode previously, despite writing that it was “important to raise this”, she said she had “felt guilty” ever since she gave her statement in 2018.
She said: “I believe it had an impact on that night shift.
“That’s something that stayed with me for years and years and years.”
She continued: “I think we all felt that her leaving shouldn’t have happened.”
Another midwife who had been on shift that night, Natasha Richards, described how she, too, had sought advice from colleagues when writing her statement, and was told to stick to the facts and not include how she had been feeling.
The inquest also heard that on-call consultants had, at times, been “stroppy” about being called in.
Miss Richards told the inquest: “That was part of the culture issues as well.
“At the time… consultants weren’t very happy to be contacted at night.
“There were occasions when they were stroppy at being contacted.”
