AN IRVINE mother who lost her baby in childbirth at Crosshouse Hospital has welcomed the announcement of a review of care at Crosshouse Hospital following the most recent incident.

Cabinet Secretary for Health, Shona Robison MSP, announced the review following calls for a public inquiry by June and Fraser Morton, from Kilmarnock, whose son Lucas died in childbirth at the hospital last year.

The death was one of six “unnecessary” baby deaths to take place at Crosshouse since 2008 according to an investigation carried out by BBC Scotland, and was attributed to failures by hospital staff, including failing to raise the alarm despite being unable to hear the baby’s heartbeat for 35 minutes.

Denise and Steven Campbell, who now live in Kilmarnock, lost their first son Joseph in similar circumstances in 2012, and added their voice to the Mortons’ call for an inquiry.

Denise, who is originally from Irvine, told the Times: “We’ve had nothing back [about the review] apart from what we have seen on TV.

“We were due to have a meeting at Crosshouse Hospital this week with [local MSP] Willie Coffey, but they’ll probably just talk to us through the review [now].”

The Campbells were told by a consultant at the time that Joseph’s birth should have been handled differently, particularly in relation to the monitoring of his heartbeat. And Denise expressed her hope that the review would leave no stone unturned in improving procedures in place at the hospital, as well as ensuring that all staff have relevant training to the same standard.

“Personally for us, first of all we want them to look at what happened to Joseph – and we want a fatal accident inquiry. He never got a fatal accident inquiry, which we didn’t know at the time.

“We want them to look at improving the procedures, and we want a fatal accident inquiry. It was just within 40 minutes that it all went wrong [during the birth], but it all connected to that death.

“We want things to change at that hospital – it’s had a bad reputation for a while. We went to another hospital to have our other two kids. There’s lots of good midwives and good doctors, but we didn’t get any of those.

“The training needs to improve, [and] the funding needs to improve to make sure things change for the better.”

Denise refuted reports that the families had received an apology from the health board, but was in no doubt that this would be forthcoming if the review revealed the expected serious failures.

“I read that they apologised for what happened, we certainly haven’t had an apology either from Crosshouse or from the health board.

“There will be negative findings, there’s no way there won’t be negative findings.”