A father in England has had to assist his wife in delivering their daughter after the midwife “panicked” and left the room.
Little Cleo Gray was born “minutes later”, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
Her father, Matt, a former ambulance technician, snapped on a pair of gloves and assisted his wife, Jo, with the delivery after realising they’d need to fend for themselves, The Sun reports.
Luckily, Matt was able to unwrap the cord from baby Cleo’s neck.
Staff returned to the room to find Jo cradling the tot in her arms, relieved but seething.
Jo told the Banbury Guardian: “It is terrifying. It could have gone so wrong.”
Cleo is Jo and Matt’s fourth child and was born on February 21, at the John Radcliffe Hospital Women’s Centre.
The Oxford University Hospitals Trust (OUH), which runs the hospital, apologised to the family.
Jo went to the John Radcliffe Hospital Women’s Centre after going into labour two weeks early.
The birth was deemed high-risk, as Jo has several medical conditions.
And with Cleo being her fourth child, it was expected that the labour would progress quickly.
Jo was five centimetres dilated when she was first admitted and had to wait before being given a bed.
“I had a lovely midwife to start with. She was dancing to make me laugh and it was really good,” she told the publication.
But as the midwife was needed elsewhere, a replacement came to attend Jo’s birth.
“It went downhill from there; it was really bad,” Jo recalled.
She claims the new midwife seemed less experienced and wasn’t communicative or reassuring.
“Within minutes I went into full blown delivery,” Jo went on.
“The midwife kept moving me. Apparently baby’s heart rate kept changing but it was after every contraction, which is normal.
“But she started panicking, which in turn, made me panic.
“Her face kept dropping and she was constantly getting me to move, telling me that baby’s heart rate was dropping and it was getting dangerous.
“So I was going into a panic attack because I’d had a traumatic birth before and nearly lost my son.
“Her heartbeat was going from 140 to 110. It was on the lower end of the scale, but nothing to panic about.”
According to NSW Health the normal baseline foetal heart rate range is 110 to 160 beats per minute.
“But before we knew it, she’d left the room. We were left on our own.
“I knew straight away the head was being delivered and there was no midwife in the room, she’d gone.”
Matt ran out to fetch the midwife, who returned, but who left again 30 seconds later.
They claim she was gone for 10 to 15 minutes.
Matt said: “After she ran out a second time, I realised we were going to have to deliver the baby ourselves. I put some gloves on and minutes later, baby was born.
“Once she was out, I saw the cord was actually around her neck. I managed to unwrap it but wasn’t able to get rid of the mucus.
“I cleaned her and dried her and gave her to Jo. They came in about two minutes afterwards and told me it was good that I’d put on gloves!”
The couple say they couldn’t reach the call button behind Jo’s bed to get help.
Jo claimed staff, including a doctor and senior midwife, didn’t apologise at the time, telling the couple the incident “was very unfortunate but everything was OK”.
The couple have since filed a formal complaint with OUH and the Care Quality Commission.
Mrs Gray said: “It is terrifying. It could have gone so wrong. We couldn’t get to a call button which was behind the bed. They couldn’t tell us what she weighed at birth or what time it was, there was no clock in the room.”
An OUH spokesman said: “We have heard from Jordan and Matthew Gray and are very sorry for the difficult childbirth experience they have described which appears to have fallen short of the high standards we set for ourselves.
“We are taking the issues they raise very seriously and will be carrying out a full investigation into what happened.
“We are unable to provide further detail while that investigation is underway but are committed to openness and transparency when sharing our full findings with Jordan and Matthew once the process has been completed.”
The OUH maternity unit is one of the 12 being investigated in the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation in the UK.
An interim report found deep-rooted issues in NHS maternity care, and flagged that the system “is not working for women, babies and families, or for staff”.
This story originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission.
