"they put my baby to the side in a bloody blanket and forgot about him."

A mother’s experience of Oxford University Hospitals Maternity Services in 2022 and 2023-25:

I lost a baby in 2022 and had a horrible birth/delivery experience. December 27th 2022 I lost my baby and delivered him in the JR hospital maternity suite at 19weeks 5days. I was told in the delivery suite ‘I’m really sorry but you will have to give birth now’ and that my baby wasn’t going to make it. When he was born, they put my baby to the side in a bloody blanket and forgot about him. He was breathing for 2hr 16minutes by himself.

They was shoving paper work in my hand to sign when I was all messed up on morphine and gas and air. One point in time all the female nurses had left the room I was alone. I was losing blood – a male doctor came in and made a fist and pushed on my stomach twice with force like a punch, I squealed in pain then he put his hand up inside my vagina they said to get the placenta out and then some was left behind and I was hemorrhaging losing 1.5litres of blood.

I was rushed into theatre and I woke up hours later to find myself in a bed with my family sat around me and my baby in a cold cot. He was handed to me and it was the saddest thing I had been through. I feel traumatised till this day. Three days later me and my partner had a funeral/jinaza and buried him on the 30th December 2022.

Then in 2023 I had my son premature at 24 weeks 5days in October due to being monitored by level 6 fetal medicine teams checking length of my cervix before they would take action, like they was almost hoping my pregnancy wouldn’t last. Then it halved and they put a vaginal stitch in which got infected and a vaginal pessary so I gave birth 24weeks 5days and he spent 5 months in the nicu and we was told we would be discharged home, only for my son to acquire CMV a couple weeks before in hospital which sedated and intubated him for 6weeks in PICU.

Then he was placed on Bellhouse children’s hospital ward where he was every other month getting ill (Norovirus, parainfluenza, hmpv) from lack of PPE from nurse interactions and Bellhouse’s ward is where all the older children who are sick or have infections go like a children’s A&E. So my son, we as a family, spent 21months in hospital and have been discharged home for only three months now.

He has oral aversion due to lack of SALT team interaction and not letting us feed him, major physiological emotional issues from his time in hospital and being poked and prodded every day. He’s had so many Cannulas and bloods taken that they’ve used up most of his veins, he’s a traumatized child. He has speech and mobility delays from spending so long sat in a cot bed.

They wanted to do medical procedures that wasn’t needed, they told us as parents, life or death he needs a Hickman line put in, so we agreed. It never got used, they didn’t need to put one in and when asking for it to be taken out they refused and longed it out until it ended up snapping a week later and it was held on by a clamp until the next day when the theatre could fix it. The Hickman line goes straight to main blood vessel in his heart, he now has a scar on his tummy and neck from this.

There’s so much more but this is a rough outline of some of my child’s experiences and ours as parents and also my birthing experiences at John Radcliffe Hospital.

This has taken a lot for me to type as I am still very traumatised myself from all of this happening to my family, but I know it’s the right thing to do.