Our family, including our little boy Adam, experienced and suffered through a frightening and torturous labour on October 25, 2009 that left Linda on life support and resulted in the preventable and devastating death of our much loved baby boy.

Since that harrowing experience we have continued to seek answers for Adam’s untimely death, and Linda’s injuries, in the hope of preventing similar outcomes for future parents and their babies.

We would like to thank Health & Disability Commissioner Anthony Hill for his investigation and findings into Adam’s death, following on from a report by Coroner Gordon Matenga, who found Adam and Linda’s midwifery care was severely lacking. Mr Hill’s investigation has been thorough and professional and provides encouraging and insightful comments.

We believe those findings are fair and the outcomes are proportionate to the areas of the maternity system that let us down the most. We suffered a shocking lack of basic midwifery care with a lack of humanity on October 25, 2009 by a self-employed new graduate LMC Midwife in the community.

A ruptured Uterus is a rare event in a developed country but it was a fully predictable outcome given the substandard level of   midwifery   care   that   we   endured.   Despite the devastating outcomes in our situation it is rare for the mother to survive – this was only made possible by the highly skilled medical teams that worked together on Linda to save her life.

It is our express wish that our four year fight for answers does not end in vain. We now challenge health minister Tony Ryall and all health professionals – particularly the midwifery sector – to accept these findings, to learn from them, and put into place a far safer environment for all future mothers, fathers, babies and midwives in New Zealand.

Linda and Robert Barlow

Related releases

• Waikato DHB accepts HDC findings
• Maternity care now a health priority

More information

• Report by the Health and Disability Commissioner
• Women’s Health