A verdict of medical misadventure was returned yesterday at the inquest into the death of a newborn baby whose position had been wrongly diagnosed as normal by midwifery staff at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.
Dundalk Coroner's Court heard the position of baby Shane McArdle was identified as being head first or normal when in fact he was in the breech position.
Hospital policy is that all breech deliveries are by Caesarean section because "of the potential unanticipated difficulties that can be encountered in delivering a breech baby."
The court heard that it was not known he was breech until 23 minutes before he was fully delivered on St Patrick's morning in March, 2004.
A paediatric team was in the delivery room; on delivery Shane was not breathing spontaneously and there was no heart beat.
He was resuscitated and put on a ventilator in the special care unit but he died just before 10pm.
Coroner Ronan Maguire heard that his mother, Ms Eileen McArdle (28), from Louth village, was first examined by a midwife at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in the early hours of March 16th, 2004, and she was then admitted.
Between then and some 12 hours later when she went to the labour ward, she had two more internal examinations.
Her husband, Ronnie, said that when she went to the labour ward "at least three different midwives saw her and did three different examinations".
Part of the purpose of an internal examination is to identify the baby's position, the coroner was told.
When the on-call consultant Dr Maire Milner went to the labour ward at 5.10pm she instructed the midwives to break her membranes but Mr McArdle said this was not done because a midwife who examined his wife said there was "a bubble" in the cervix and they would burst imminently and she did not need to break them.
Mr and Mrs McArdle contested a note in her records which said she had declined to have her waters broken.
Cross-examined by Mr MacDonagh, Dr Milner agreed it was noted on several occasions that Ms McArdle had been examined on a regular basis and there had been a mis-diagnosis of the baby's position.
Ms McArdle said she felt her son's death "could have been prevented and was totally unnecessary".
She told the court it should have been discovered that he was in the breech position.
Mr Maguire found that Shane died in accordance with the postmortem findings that it was due to intrapartum birth asphyxia in late diagnosis of a breech presentation, complicated by late delivery of the infant's head.
He returned a verdict of medical misadventure.