A NEWBORN baby girl died after an ambulance took more than 30 minutes to arrive when her mum noticed she was “stone cold”, an inquest will hear.
Wyllow-Raine Swinburn died after Amelia Pill spent seven minutes waiting for someone to answer a 999 call.
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Her family then spent 40 minutes giving her CPR as they waited for paramedics at their home, Oxford Coroner’s Court was told in 2023.
Senior Coroner Darren Salter adjourned the inquest to allow for further evidence to be gathered.
A pre-inquest review (PIR) into the death of the three-day-old was held at Oxford Coroner’s Court yesterday.
Wyllow-Raine was born at John Radcliffe Hospital on September 27, 2022, and discharged home on the evening of September 29.
She then collapsed in the early hours of September 30.
Her mother called an ambulance at 4.38am when Wyllow-Raine appeared to have stopped breathing.
There was a delay of over seven minutes in the emergency call being answered by the ambulance service.
She awoke her brother Luke by shouting: “Why are they not answering the f**king phone?”
The baby’s grandmother Anna Fisher was downstairs looking after the dogs when the incident happened.
She ran upstairs as the desperate new-mum Amelia was crying out: “No-one is coming, no-one is coming.”
An ambulance did not arrive at the family home until 5.09am, over 30 minutes after the call was made.
Wyllow-Raine was taken to John Radcliffe Hospital where she was pronounced dead shortly after her arrival.
A post-mortem examination was undertaken which revealed nothing abnormal about Wyllow-Raine – including any very rare conditions.
As a result the paediatric pathologist Dr Darren Farrell determined her cause of death as sudden unexpected death in infancy, unexplained.
After her death, Oxford University NHS Foundation Trust launched an internal investigation.
It found that Wyllow-Raine would have been in a prolonged period of cardiac arrest before the 999 call.
The overall outcome was “not likely to be influenced by the time taken to answer the 999 call and the arrival of the ambulance”.
The full inquest is due to be resumed on December 2-3, 2024.
