‘I felt guilty. As if I’d done something wrong’
NESTLED in his pale blue babygrow, tiny Dominic Smith looks the perfect newborn. Hours later he was dead. Staff had failed to notice he had developed pneumonia and he passed away as his mother slept nearby, an inquest later heard.
Hospital bosses eventually admitted there were failings of care before the death, in June 2015, and Chelsea was last week awarded £28,700. The trust in charge has apologised.
She has now told how she is still traumatised by her ordeal at Royal Oldham Hospital three years ago.
And she believes government cuts and staff shortages may have contributed to the tragedy.
“The pain has been unbearable,” said Chelsea, 24. Hospitals need a lot more funding and staff. This would help prevent future deaths.”
A coroner ruled that neglect had contributed towards Dominic’s death in 2015 and staff had missed several opportunities to save him.
Doctors failed to notice that his mother’s waters had broken four days before she was admitted.
She visited hospital three times complaining that she was in agony but was sent home.
Chelsea was finally admitted on June 1 and Dominic, her first-born, was delivered via forceps at 4am the next day weighing 6lb 14oz after showing signs of distress in the womb.
She said: “He was perfect. I was so tired but after he started crying, everything seemed fine. I was so happy.”
That evening he started to turn blue.
Fighting back tears, Chelsea said: “It was about supper time and a healthcare assistant came in. She said, ‘Isn’t he cute!’ and then she just stopped and looked at me.
“Then she ran out of the room, ran back in, grabbed him and hit a button and ran out. Nobody told me what was happening. Obviously I was panicking and getting upset.
“Another health care visitor came in and told me that he had stopped breathing. A team ran through straight away and they were working on him for about ten minutes. One of the midwives said ‘You’ll laugh about this when you’re older. He’s just being a naughty boy. He’ll be fine.’
“Next thing, they came in and told me that he had died.
“They said they didn’t want to resuscitate him any longer because he had brain damage.”
Shattered Chelsea and husband Tony, 31, clung to each other as they broke down in tears.
Early next morning she was woken up and quizzed about Dominic’s death by two officers. She and Tony were ‘made to feel like criminals,’ she said.
“It felt like they were blaming me. It felt like they thought I had done something to the baby. It was absolutely awful, we just cried our way through it.
“They were asking me what happened, what I had done, what I had given him. When it finished, I told the hospital I wanted to get out. I didn’t want to stay there any more, I felt like I had been failed in every way.”
The couple returned home but found it hard to cope. Tragically Chelsea couldn’t stop tormenting herself about whether she could have done more. She said: “I felt so guilty. I felt like I’d hurt my baby or done something wrong when I was pregnant.
“I was struggling, I wasn’t coping well at all. I was drinking a lot. I was blowing all my money on nothing.”
Just a month after Dominic’s death Chelsea became pregnant with her daughter, Summer-Ann, now two. She said: “I wanted to have a baby to hold and feel like a proper mum.
“Not having my son was so hard. I needed something to keep me sane. Dominic should be at school now. He should be causing more mischief than Summer does.
“The inquest helped. I didn’t have to
I was struggling. I wasn’t coping at all well. I was drinking a lot Chelsea Smith
blame myself any more. It felt like a weight was lifted but I was still so angry.”
After losing Dominic, Chelsea was shocked to learn the hospital was already being probed over the deaths of other babies. An inquiry exposed neglect, poor attitude and chronic staff shortages.
And an internal report linked staff shortages to a series of deaths, although this did not include Dominic.
The document exposed shameful lapses in maternity care at the Royal Oldham and North Manchester General.
In it, maternity director Deborah Carter wrote: “The effect of poor staffing numbers in clinics has meant women have fragmented care, suffered long waits and not had appropriate management.”
Childbirth charity NCT suggested last December that maternity care in England was ‘in crisis.’
A report found that a total of 276,767 maternity mistakes were logged between April 2015 and 2017 – the equivalent of one for every five births.
While most were minor or near misses, the figures released by NHS Improvement included 288 cases in England in which mother or baby died.
The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which ran the Oldham hospital at the time of Dominic’s death, merged with the Salford Royal NHS Foundation to become the Northern Care Alliance NHS Group last year.
Simon Mehigan, group director of midwifery and gynaecology, said: “We would like to express our sympathy to baby Dominic Smith’s parents, family and friends for their loss and apologise to his mum, Chelsea, for the mental anguish she has experienced since losing her son.
“We have carried out a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding Dominic’s death at The Royal Oldham Hospital on June 2, 2015.
“We are sad to say that he did not receive the high standard of care we usually provide, and for that we are sorry.
“We have introduced a number of improvements to prevent these failings from occurring again.”