The parents of a stillborn baby have received a record £2.8 million settlement from a hospital trust, at which they previously worked, after its failings caused their child’s death.
Harriet Hawkins was stillborn at Nottingham City Hospital in 2016 after a six-day labour.
An official external report later found 13 failures in Harriet and her mother’s care and concluded her death was “almost certainly preventable”.
Her parents, Sarah and Jack Hawkins, both worked at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) at the time of her death but neither have been able to return due to the “psychological and psychiatric impact” of the event.
A legal case against NUH has now been settled for £2.8 million, which solicitors acting on behalf of the couple have said is the largest payout for a stillbirth clinical negligence case.
A Root Cause Analysis Investigation Report found the trust failed to follow correct risk management policies, to consider the patients full clinical history, and that it delayed administering appropriate treatment.
It added there were “inadequate systems and processes which did not support the sharing of clinical information, records of phone calls and hospital admissions and an inability to access these records in all clinical areas”.
‘Multiple missed opportunities’ for intervention earlier in the labour
There were “multiple missed opportunities for intervention and appropriate monitoring earlier in the labour”, it added, and had one of these been taken it would have been likely Harriet’s death “would not have occured”.
Following the publication of the report in 2018, Mr Hawkins said he and his wife were “both unable to work because of the psychological and psychiatric impact Harriet’s death has had on us”.
The Trust apologised after the report and said it had already made “substantial changes”.
Mr and Mrs Hawkins were first told Harriet had died of an infection. It took nine hours for her to be delivered after dying.
Janet Baker, from Switalskis Solicitors, which represented Mr and Mrs Hawkins, told the BBC: “£2.8m is the highest damages award in a stillbirth case, with legal fees for both sides the total cost to the NHS is likely to be over £3.5m.
“I believe that this is a cost which was unnecessary and could have been avoided if NUH had acknowledged responsibility for Harriet’s death straight away and had been open with Sarah and Jack.”
She added that the couple suffered “psychiatric injury” because of the “shocking and traumatic way” in which their child died.
“But this was made significantly worse by the protracted failure of NUH to acknowledge responsibility for Harriet’s death and the psychiatric injuries caused to Sarah and Jack,” she said.
