The time just after you have experienced a stillbirth or your baby has died soon after birth is very distressing. It is hard to take in all that is happening, but there are practical matters that you may need to know about. Things like: “What choices do I have about what happens next?”, “What happens to my baby?” and “What happens about a post-mortem examination?” This article gives you information that should help you to manage during this very difficult time.
Secure Your Medical Records Before Anything Else
Please ask for your full obstetric and neonatal records as soon as possible, ideally within the first couple of weeks. This includes CTG traces (those fetal heart rate monitoring logs from labour) as well as all clinical notes, scan reports, and drug charts.
Why it’s important to do it urgently: your hospital will also start its own local review pretty promptly, and the records will be requested as part of that. The full records belong to you. They are your family’s memories and your property. They are also the building blocks of anything that may develop in the future, whether that be a formal investigation, a complaint, or legal action.
Know Your Rights Before You Go Back to Work
If a baby is stillborn after 24 weeks of pregnancy, the mother still gets her full statutory maternity leave and pay. Those rights are not extinguished by the baby’s death. That time, weeks or months without the immediate pressure of returning to work, can be the difference between completely breaking down and being able to grieve properly.
Partners and co-parents may also have rights to leave. Find out what your employer’s policy is on top of the statutory minimum and don’t assume it’ll all be denied.
But you will be worrying about money. Funeral costs, counselling, time off for which you won’t be paid anyway. Those are real worries. Pursuing Stillbirth Compensation through a legal claim will at least provide for all those things directly: bereavement counselling, funeral costs, and private psychological treatment. All of which a complaint to PALS won’t get you.
Understand What’s Actually Being Investigated
After a stillbirth or neonatal death, there’s likely to be a hospital inquiry. Parents are commonly told this is happening but not informed why, or to what degree they can contribute. An SI review is a hospital’s internal inquiry. It’s entirely run by the trust where the death happened. That’s not to suggest it is ever flimsy, but this is what bereaved parents must understand: the limits an SI review has. It’s a process for learning. It is not rigorously legally overseen, entirely independent, or about delivering outcomes for your family. Its roots lie in an organisation’s internal governance. Quite often what is most useful for hospitals is deciding something new won’t be done, in the impossibly rare chance a similar tragedy strikes.
Referral criteria apply to different cases for the Maternity and Neonatal Safety Investigations (MNSI) programme. This is a government-run, independently operated NHS arm’s length body, which parents might assume covers all deaths but does not. If your child’s death is referred to the MNSI, you have the automatic right to contribute your personal timeline. Submitting written questions and receiving a copy of the final report is also available.
For unexpected and unexplained neonatal deaths, potentially modifiable factors, and certain antepartum stillbirths, there will be a Coroner’s Inquest. This is a public legal examination. A solicitor can, and perhaps should, involve themselves on your behalf at this stage.
The Difference Between Making a Complaint and Taking Legal Action
PALS (Patient Advice and Liaison Service) can help you communicate with the management of your hospital and will endeavour to help you raise concerns. Resolving a complaint through PALS may also mean you receive an apology, that a procedure changes so it doesn’t happen to someone else, or that you get an explanation from senior staff. All or any of which, of course, is not to be scoffed at.
But PALS can’t achieve legal accountability. It can’t bring compensation for your family. It can’t establish whether or not a duty of care was breached on the part of the hospital and their staff, or if clinical negligence was a contributory cause to your baby’s death.
For that, you need a clinical negligence solicitor to make a formal legal claim. This process includes obtaining your medical records and getting statements from the staff involved, sending your records to an independent medical expert for review, and subsequently identifying and proving that there was a substandard level of care according to current standards. If there was, the solicitor will write to the hospital or practitioner involved setting this out and, hopefully, negotiate an acceptable financial settlement for you.
Why the Solicitor You Choose Matters
Obstetric medicine and neonatal care are specialised fields. A general personal injury firm that handles road accidents and slips and falls won’t have the medical knowledge to spot what went wrong during a labour that appeared routine, or to challenge assumptions about when an emergency C-section should have been called.
You need a solicitor with specific experience in birth injury and stillbirth cases, someone who knows what CTG traces should look like, what informed consent means in the context of assisted delivery, and how to identify where a duty of care was breached in a crowded delivery room.
There’s also a time limit. Legal claims in this area generally must be filed within three years. That window feels long when you’re in acute grief. It is not.
The practical aftermath of a medical tragedy is brutal to navigate. But knowing your rights, securing your records, and getting the right legal advice early gives your family the best possible chance of understanding what happened, and being supported through what comes next.
