Rex Martinich
A family whose daughter died hours after her birth from an undiagnosed heart defect has rejected a coroner’s finding that her death was unpreventable.
Thea Flaskett died on the morning of September 11, 2023, a little more than four hours after she was born at a Queensland hospital.
Her inquest was told the newborn suffered from a congenital defect called transposition of the great arteries, which affects blood flow through the heart.
Thea’s mother, Meg Flaskett, had a routine morphology scan at 20 weeks of her pregnancy in May 2023 that did not detect the defect.
“The weight of the evidence supports a finding that Thea’s death was not preventable, her transposition of the great arteries not having been detected [before birth],” Queensland Deputy State Coroner Stephanie Gallagher said in her findings on Monday.
Thea’s heart defect was “not uncommon” to be missed during pregnancy, regardless of the quality of the scans, Gallagher found.
Thea’s mother and partner James Flaskett had sought an inquest into her death, with hearings in Brisbane last year.
In a statement that criticised the inquest’s findings, Mrs Flaskett said the family was “devastated, but not surprised, by the outcome”.
“Had Thea’s condition been diagnosed before birth, her labour, delivery and immediate management would have been fundamentally different,” she said.
She disputed that Thea’s heart defect was the only major contributor to her death at Redcliffe Hospital, north of Brisbane.
“Although these findings bring the coronial process to an end, they do not bring us peace, nor do they answer the questions that have driven us for almost three years,” she said.
Queensland Health supervising sonographer Craig John Collins testified during the inquest that he performed about 150 ultrasounds per year and had only once discovered a case of transposition from a scan.
In her findings, Gallagher said: “Ideally, Thea’s [heart defect] would have been suspected during Mrs Flaskett’s morphology scan and gone on to be diagnosed by a materno-fetal medicine specialist or paediatric cardiologist soon thereafter.”
Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital senior staff neonatologist Pieter Koorts testified that even if Thea’s heart defect had been detected and she was born at a major city hospital and received immediate surgery, her survival was “not assured”.
Gallagher said Redcliffe Hospital staff did everything they could with the resources they had.
“Despite resuscitating Thea to a high standard, her outcome was determined by her underlying congenital cardiac abnormality, not the standard of her post-delivery care,” she said.
Gallagher recommended Metro North Health consider adopting the bedside live-streaming services and neonatal retrieval processes used in NSW.
AAP
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