East Kent hospital baby deaths: Harry Richford's family's five-year fight for justice

The grandfather of a baby who died at a hospital that was fined over failings in the delivery has spoken of his five-year fight for justice.

Derek Richford was speaking as an independent report into baby deaths at the East Kent Hospitals Trust will be released this week.

He said he "came up against a brick wall" while searching for answers over the death of grandson Harry Richford.

The trust has apologised for the death, which it initially said was "expected".

Harry, seen with his parents Sarah and Tom Richford, died aged just seven days

An inquest into Harry's death at Margate's Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in 2017 found it was wholly avoidable and contributed to by neglect.

Coroner Christopher Sutton-Mattocks said the inquest, which was finally held in 2020, was only ordered due to the family's persistence.

The following year the trust was fined £733,000 after admitting failing to provide safe care and treatment for mother Sarah Richford and her son following a prosecution by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

'Just didn't feel right'

Mr Richford said: "To start with we felt fairly alone and we felt like we were coming up against a brick wall.

"The trust were refusing at that time to call the coroner. They were reporting Harry's death as 'expected'.

"We didn't contact anyone other than the CQC just to say 'look there's been a problem here'."

He said at a meeting with the trust, more than five months later, "we suddenly realised that there were a huge [number] of errors".

"All of this was beginning to add up to things that just didn't feel right."

Mr Richford told the BBC: "It took me about a year to come up with all the detail I needed and to speak to all the right people."

He said the family then spoke to the Health Safety Investigation Branch who found there were issues.

Mr Richford also tracked down a "damning" report by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG).

"In the end it was like peeling back the layers of an onion, and the more you took off, the more you found," he said.

In January 2019 the family were invited to London to meet CQC officials, Mr Richford said.

"We showed them the RCOG report, and they said 'where did you see this? We've never seen it'," he added.

'Very dismissive'

Mr Richford said "people started really listening" when the inquest sparked media interest.

But he said the trust "was very dismissive".

He added: "If I find a brick wall, I'll find a way round, I'll go over it, and if I have to, I'll go under it."

The inquest found more than a dozen areas of concern in the care of Harry and his mother, including failings in the way an "inexperienced" doctor carried out the delivery, followed by delays in resuscitation.

Lawyers for some of the families affected by maternity failings at the trust are calling for any improvements identified in the upcoming report to be "implemented without delay".

Anita Jewitt, a specialist medical negligence lawyer at Irwin Mitchell, said; "Too many maternity reviews have highlighted similar issues across the country and it's crucial that changes are made to prevent more heartache for families in future. "

Mr Richford said he did not want to hear more apologies from the trust.

"It's not good enough, they've got to make changes," he said.

"It's become absolutely clear, that had the trust learned from the errors they made at a very early stage, and I'm talking 2010, 2011, Harry and a whole lot more kids would be alive today."

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