Baby died after mother fell asleep in hospital

A PARTIALLY-SIGHTED woman told an inquest yesterday how her two-day old son died after she apparently fell asleep having breast fed him in a maternity ward bed.

Press Association journalist Lisa Salmon, 36, said hospital staff had given her baby Conor to feed in bed despite her being registered blind and having hardly any sleep for three days.

She told a coroner that Conor had been born normally at Leeds General Hospital (LGI) on January 30, 2002, weighing in at 7lbs 6oz.

But the inquest heard he died on February 1 from a lack of oxygen to his brain. A pathologist said the likely cause was "overlying" by his mother.

Ms Salmon said Conor had not taken easily to breast feeding and was pleased when healthcare assistant Karen Lapping had shown her a different technique in the early hours of February 1 which involved lying down in the bed with her son.

But she told the court she next remembers checking Conor and finding him limp beside her. He was rushed to a ventilator and although his colour improved he was not breathing on his own, the inquest heard.

Later that day Ms Salmon and her partner, PA chief sports reporter Mark Walker, agreed that the machine should be turned off.

Ms Salmon, from Horsforth, Leeds, told the court she had no recollection of falling asleep after feeding Conor but accepted from hospital records she must have slept for about one hour and 40 minutes.

"I didn't make any decision to go to sleep," she said. "I just wanted to stay with my baby like that because it was lovely and comfortable and hold him a bit.

The court heard how Ms Salmon, now pregnant again, was registered blind at the time of Conor's birth following a car accident a year before.

British Home Office pathologist Professor Helen Whitwell told the inquest in Leeds that Conor died due to the starvation of oxygen to his brain and the most likely explanation was "overlying" by Ms Salmon.

The Professor of Forensic Pathology at Sheffield University said there had been a large increase in cases of "co-sleeping" deaths in the last 10 years especially related to carers falling asleep on sofas.

But, when pressed by the West Yorkshire coroner David Hinchliff, she agreed she had never come across a case in a teaching hospital maternity unit.

Staff from the unit told the inquest the technique shown to Ms Salmon in which a baby was breast fed in bed with mother lying down was a "quite normal procedure". But the advice to mothers now was to avoid this, instead urging them to breast feed in a chair or in bed with someone watching.