A mother who suffered acute brain damage, due to medical negligence following the birth of her third child, has won the right to more than £500,000 damages from the NHS.
An obstetric emergency had developed during the child’s birth when a scar left by a previous Caesarean delivery ruptured. The woman suffered a heart attack five days later when a blot clot formed in her brain.
Since the incident, the woman has been in a ‘minimally responsive’ state is being looked after in a nursing home. The child had been starved of oxygen during his birth and died just short of his second birthday.
In upholding her claim against the NHS trust which ran the hospital where the events took place, the High Court found that, had the woman been given sufficient doses of the blood thinning drug Heparin following the birth, the events that followed would most likely have been averted. The amount of her compensation for hospital negligence has yet to be finally assessed; however, her lawyers have valued her claim at more than half a million pounds.