Man turns midwife as pager fails

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/england/somerset/6649767.stm

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A husband was forced to deliver his baby daughter on the bathroom floor after a midwife failed to turn up for the home-birth.

Jet Malong, 39, from Bath, frantically paged the on-call midwife after his wife, Steph, went into labour.

But 90 minutes later, no one had contacted them and Mr Malong had to deliver baby Lara on his own.

Wiltshire Primary Care Trust is blaming the blunder on a fault with the pager system and has begun an investigation.

Pager message

"It was frightening and a bit scary," Mrs Malong, 31, said.

"You just imagine all the things that could have gone wrong if the baby had not been breathing or if I had been bleeding."

The couple, who have a four-year-old son, had been encouraged to have their second child at home after the pre-natal team at the Bath's Royal United Hospital assured them it would be a simple procedure.

I realised the baby was about to make an entrance and told Jet he would have to help me deliver the baby on the bathroom floor Stephanie Malong

They were given a pager number and told to contact an external call centre, which would then process the information and alert the on-call midwife.

But there was a delay of more than an hour in the pager message getting through.

"I told my husband to tell them it was getting really urgent, but no one rang back," said Mrs Malong.

"I realised the baby was about to make an entrance and told Jet he would have to help me deliver the baby on the bathroom floor."

Mr Malong, originally from the Philippines, then contacted the hospital and a midwife and an ambulance arrived 20 minutes later.

A spokesman for Wiltshire PCT, contracted to provide maternity services to the hospital, apologised for the distress caused during the birth last month.

He said: "This incident has been reported and a full investigation is under way as to why the midwives did not receive the pager message from Stephanie Malong for over one hour.

"The pager company has been contacted and is helping us with our investigation."