Editorial: Sad lesson in the loss of a child

Losing a child must be the worst thing possible for parents and to lose a child only 12 hours after he or she was born would be the cruellest cut of all.

The birth of a child is a time of love and joy. You have such high hopes for that child.

It is a start of something fresh and wonderful. To have that hope and love destroyed would crush even the strongest person.

A coroner's report into the death of an infant boy at Hawke's Bay Hospital on June 23, 2011, makes for despairing reading. The little boy, who cannot be named, died 12 hours after being born last year.

Hastings coroner Chris Devonport's findings said that texting was an inappropriate way for midwives to complete clinical assessments.

The failure to make direct voice contact with an expectant mother was one of a series of errors highlighted in the coroner's report.

The report said text messaging between the Hawke's Bay midwife and her Napier client "prevented adequate clinical assessment".

The unfortunate chain of events occurred when the pregnant woman had texted her midwife after losing blood and feeling some discomfort.

She responded by text before visiting the woman at her home.

The coroner said the tragedy was a "lack of awareness of a clinical situation and a failure to notice abnormalities of foetal distress that may have saved the life of the baby. He did add that even if the emergency delivery had been quicker, it was impossible to know if the baby would have been neurologically completely normal.

He warned that texting was not a tool for clinical assessments.

This is one of those situations where you feel sorry for all those involved.

Obviously the parents have suffered the most, but one must also feel for the midwife and doctors involved in the tragic events.

These individuals were trained to do their jobs and would not have set out to make the errors of judgment they made.

I am sure that the midwife and doctors involved would do things differently if they could have that time over. But the tragedy is that mistakes were made and questions needed to be asked.

Let's hope that lessons have been learned and that systems have been put in place to stop this happening again.

Anything to prevent a family going through the trauma of losing a newborn child.