A MOTHER whose baby nearly died because of a bungling midwife has spoken out about the incident. The 29-year-old, who asked not to be named because she did not want her son, now four, to be identified, said she had made a formal complaint because she did not want any other mother to suffer as she had.

Midwife Linda Cantillon, 61, was struck off by a Nursing and Midwifery Council misconduct hearing after it was told about a string of negligent mistakes which she had made while working at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital.

The local mother, who worked as an auxiliary on the maternity ward at the time of her son’s birth, made a written complaint seven months after he was born because she felt a verbal one would not have been taken seriously.

‘I thought that I shouldn’t complain to start with because I worked on the ward,’ she said.

‘I felt guilty at first but because I was aware of similar things happening to other people, I knew I had to complain.’

She said she had decided on a water birth but during the 10-hour labour there were several complications and she became weak and was in agony.

‘Linda refused me pain relief when I was begging for it because she said I was too tired,’ she said.

‘She didn’t monitor me properly because if she had she would have seen that there was something wrong with my baby.’

After the birth, her son, whose umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around his neck, was rushed to the Special Care Baby Unit and eventually resuscitated.

‘But all my notes were wrong because Linda had not written them at the time. She wrote them after the birth,’ she said.

‘She lied in them. She said she had monitored me but made up heart rates and put them in.’

The mother explained that during labour she realised things were not being done properly but was in so much pain that she just wanted it to be over.

‘I had seen enough births through my job to know that that is not what you’re supposed to do,’ she said.

‘The policy ‘disputed by the hospital’ in Guernsey is that two midwives have to be in the delivery room.

‘She didn’t have another in with her because she knew what she was doing was wrong.’

After some time, two more midwives came rushing in because they could hear the mother’s screams.

‘Linda was trying to pull my son out from under his arms because his shoulder was stuck.

‘One of the other midwives made me stand up in the water and pushed down on my coccyx.

‘That eventually worked,’ she said.

‘When he came out there was silence and the expression on their faces told me it was not good…’

But her son is now fit and healthy.

‘I feel very lucky that my son is well. I firmly believe that if the midwives had not come in when they did he would have died.

‘I’m so grateful to the one who made me stand up,’ she said.

She added that she felt vindicated by the tribunal’s decision to strike off Ms Cantillon.

‘I feel relieved,’ she said. ‘She will not have the opportunity to do it to anyone else.

‘That was my main reason for complaining, so that no one else would go through what I did.’