'Doctors ignored me - my girls are gone'

Kelly Jones says staff ignored her concerns about her unborn twins

An investigation is to be held at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, following at least seven avoidable deaths in less than two years.

Here, some of those parents tell of how they lost their babies.

Kelly Jones was delighted to discover she was expecting twin girls. Already a mother of two girls, the babies would complete her family, she thought.

But she began to feel pain during her pregnancy. Despite repeatedly telling staff at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital about this, and asking them to properly assess her, Kelly was ignored.

At one point she tried to discharge herself because she was so unhappy with the care she was getting.

By the time medics finally took her seriously, it was too late. Her twins Ella and Lola were stillborn in September 2014.

A letter from the trust to Kelly says their investigation "shows that both babies had died from severe hypoxic ischemia (oxygen starvation to the brain) contributed to by delay in recognising deterioration in the foetal heart traces and the missed opportunities for earlier delivery".

Kelly said her midwife "came in crying, saying I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry".

"Too late, damage is done - my girls are gone," said Kelly. "Because they couldn't be bothered doing their job."

The trust's letter, dated June 2015, promised that improvements would be made in the monitoring of baby heart rates.

Medical staff failed to listen to Kye Hall's heart at critical times

Two months later, Kye Hall died aged just four days.

An inquest into his death found the failure to listen to his heart rate at two critical times prior to delivery contributed to this death at the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford.

Four months after Kye's death, Graham Scott Holmes-Smith was stillborn at the same hospital. The trust has accepted that with proper monitor of the baby's foetal heart rate, "on the balance of probabilities, baby Graham would have been born alive".

Ten days after Graham's death, in December 2015, also at the Princess Royal Hospital, Ivy Morris was born. Again, staff failed to properly monitor her heart rate, a mistake that was to prove fatal.

While Ivy was born alive, she was in extremely poor condition and died in May 2016 from complications associated with her birth.

An inquest found her "death would have been prevented had appropriate monitoring taken place in the second stage of labour".

"It (the death) should never have happened," said Ivy's mother, Tamsin.

"To hear that this (mistake) has happened before - it's just another blow. I've had an apology from the hospital, and assurances that this won't happen again. And I accept those.

"But other families have had those assurances and those apologies and if those were followed up, in the way that they said that they would, then I would have my daughter."