We will not relaxation till somebody is distributed to jail for killing our child

When anyone asks Sarah Hawkins if she has children, she answers: ‘Yes, two daughters.’ Sometimes she lets herself pause, for the briefest of moments, before uttering the unimaginable words: ‘But one of them is dead.’

Harriet, Sarah’s first-born child, would have turned eight in April. She often imagines her playing with her younger sister Lottie, who is four and a half, giggling and chasing her around the kitchen. 

She wonders if Harriet would have shared Lottie’s mop of blonde curly hair, or had the same impish grin. Lottie has lots of questions about her big sister, too. Can Harriet come to her birthday party next year? Does she mind if Lottie cuddles her teddy? Is she lonely, wherever she is?

It breaks Sarah’s heart that her two girls never got the chance to meet.

For Harriet was stillborn, eight awful years ago, after a perfectly healthy pregnancy and with no underlying complications or health conditions.

Their daughter was pronounced dead on April 17, 2016, due to a catalogue of failings, negligence and woeful mismanagement by hospital staff – at the very NHS Trust where both Sarah, a former senior physiotherapist, and her husband Jack, an acute medicine consultant, worked.

Sarah, who had already been in labour for five days, then had to endure another nine agonising hours – more than double the clinically recommended time – to deliver Harriet, all the while knowing the baby she would cradle in her arms would never take a breath.

‘I was pushing all that time, knowing Harriet was dead and no one was coming to help,’ she says.

‘It was inhumane. I thought I was dying, too. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t really care.’

Since that day, she and Jack have been fighting, not only to keep their daughter’s memory alive, but to hold to account the individuals and organisations responsible. 

In their search for justice from Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust, they have joined forces with other families with shockingly similar stories to tell – and, in doing so, revealed endemic shortcomings in maternity care at the institution.

In 2017 an external review found no fewer than 13 failures in the Hawkins’ case and concluded that Harriet’s death was ‘almost certainly preventable’. Four years later the family received a £2.8 million settlement from the Trust, believed to be the largest of its kind. They would, they say, have paid it back in an instant to have Harriet alive today.

But their journey, which is charted in a documentary, Maternity: Broken Trust, on ITV1 tonight, did not end there.

Harriet’s death is now part of an independent review by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, ongoing since 2022, which is scrutinising more than 1,800 cases of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths and injuries to women and babies over ten years at NUH.

And in September, the police launched a criminal investigation into these incidents – something Jack and Sarah hope might bring them justice once and for all.

‘We’re not going to stop until someone’s in jail,’ admits Sarah. ‘It sounds awful, but they killed our daughter, they ruined our careers and they ruined our lives. Somebody has to pay.’

Certainly, the pain of losing Harriet has taken a devastating toll on both Sarah, 41, and Jack, 54. Neither has been able to return to work, instead finding their days and nights consumed by the enormity of paperwork, emails, phonecalls and meetings involved in fighting their case.

Working for the NHS again is something they cannot yet – perhaps ever – contemplate.

Both have had extensive counselling and suffer from depression, PTSD and flashbacks. For years, they couldn’t bear to look at babies, pregnant women or proud, smiling parents with their children. 

Sarah still has terrible nightmares. In one, she is standing with Harriet in her arms, screaming and screaming for help, while all around her people are laughing.

For his part, Jack is racked by guilt. He admits: ‘There’s still a bit of me that thinks, ‘I’m a doctor, why on earth did I allow this to happen to my family? I’ve failed to protect my family.’ ‘

Though they maintain a united front for their daughter’s sake, their relationship has not weathered this wretched and arduous course. They split up four years ago, just after Lottie was born, and now live in separate houses in Nottingham, a short distance from one another.

‘It’s been really difficult,’ says Sarah. ‘After Harriet died, I made sure that Jack was involved in everything, because it’s so easy for fathers not to be involved, and then I got to a point where what I’d been through wasn’t recognised, and I just felt really alone.’

‘It exposed how different we are, which is I suspect how everybody might be if their child died,’ Jack adds. ‘You think you’re similar, but wait until you have to deal with this, and then leaving the cap off the toothpaste becomes divorce material.

‘It’s an awful lot to put people through. I hold individuals responsible for my daughter’s death, for my mental health, for [the breakdown of] my marriage.’

This is far from how Jack and Sarah, who met at work in 2008 and married in 2013, ever imagined they would feel. ‘We’re both one of four, so we would have liked to have had a big family,’ Sarah says. ‘Jack wanted three children, but that’s an odd number so I said it had to be four.’

Her pregnancy with Harriet was ‘low-risk, normal,’ she recalls.

‘We did a trip to Belize when I was 20 weeks pregnant – I remember thinking that would be my last non-kid-friendly holiday for a while.’

They didn’t find out the gender of the baby, instead preferring to wait for a surprise at the birth. The nursery was newly decorated and filled with freshly laundered babygros and teddies.

The couple hadn’t discussed a birth plan. As they were due to have their baby at the place where they both worked, they put their faith in NHS colleagues.

‘I didn’t want to make this massive plan – they were the experts; we trusted them,’ says Sarah. That trust turned out to be tragically misplaced.

Sarah went into labour on April 12, 2016, a day after Harriet’s due date. She was nervous but ready for the ordeal ahead, and excited to meet their baby.

A community midwife found her to be 2cm dilated, and advised her to call the Queen’s Medical Centre, where she was booked to give birth. They were invited to come into the labour ward that evening, but sent home again as Sarah was told her contractions were too far apart to be in ‘established labour’.

Over the next five days she and Jack called the hospital another 11 times. They also returned to the labour ward, only for Sarah to be assessed, reassured and discharged without proper examination.

Several times she begged to be admitted again, but her pleas were refused.

On one occasion she was given diamorphine (a strong painkiller), codeine and paracetamol – in quantities Jack describes as ‘huge’. ‘I just cannot imagine giving those doses of those medicines and sending someone home,’ he says.

But Sarah’s pain was intensifying – at one point she collapsed – and the couple became increasingly frantic.

‘The midwife on the phone told me to have a bath and sniff some lavender,’ Sarah recalls. ‘I’d never done this before, it was awful, but I assumed it was normal labour.’

By early morning on April 17, however, they both knew something was wrong.

‘I was lying on the sofa, crying, in excruciating pain,’ Sarah recalls. ‘I didn’t know it at the time but I was pushing, and then something started to hang out between my legs.’

They rushed to Nottingham City Hospital – the other one under the Trust’s care, as the Queen’s Medical Centre was understaffed – driving straight there rather than waiting for an ambulance, expecting midwives to be ready for an obstetric emergency.

Instead they put Sarah in the birthing suite, examined her – she was 9cm dilated, with Harriet’s head visible between her legs – and checked for a foetal heart rate, falsely mistaking it for Sarah’s.

When another midwife couldn’t find Harriet’s heart rate, a doctor was called – and he announced the heart-wrenching news: ‘I’m sorry, your baby’s dead.’

Sarah’s screams echoed through the ward.

Ultimately, they later learned, an obstruction from her mother’s bladder – which should have been identified and resolved much earlier – led to Harriet suffocating in the womb.

Jack believes Harriet was already dead or dying by the time they arrived at hospital the final time. When the midwife realised, she accused Sarah of not telling them she hadn’t urinated, suggesting that she, as a physio, ought to know that was a sign of a problem.

Harriet Hawkins, a perfect 6lb 12oz, was born after a painful and unimaginably difficult labour, culminating in surgical intervention. Jack couldn’t bring himself to cut the umbilical cord and, initially, neither he nor Sarah could bear to hold her, so broken were they by grief. They asked a midwife to tell them the colour of her eyes.

When they did cuddle her, the pain was ‘extraordinary’, Jack says. ‘Her skin was so soft. I remember holding her, just wishing that she would come back to life. I couldn’t understand it.’

They have only a handful of photographs of Harriet from that time. She is pink-cheeked and peaceful, her little eyes forever shut, while her parents’ are red-rimmed and hollow.

One picture shows her feet, chubby and crinkled – feet that would never take first steps, or try on school shoes, or learn to dance.

They had ten days with their daughter, whose tiny, beautiful body was kept cold, before she went for a hospital postmortem, something Sarah and Jack – who knew that something untoward had happened – requested.

‘I read her a story, I Love You To The Moon And Back, and then we said goodbye to her, we put her down, and left that room and walked out,’ recalls Jack.

What followed were, as they put it, ‘pretty dark days’.

They drove home with an empty car seat. Friends and family cleared the house of newborn things.

Their sadness was engulfed by anger: why was their healthy baby girl dead?

Under the current law – which they are campaigning to change – if a baby dies before or during labour, the death is classified as a stillbirth and cannot be investigated by a coroner, so there was no inquest to find out what had gone wrong.

Almost immediately the hospital tried to pass her death off as an infection – a claim since proven to be false, but one which might have convinced bereaved parents with less medical training.

And so began their long and frustrating fight for Harriet, the daughter whose absence from family occasions – every Christmas, birthday, Mother’s Day since – has left a gaping hole in their lives.

It took two years, during which investigations were being carried out, for Harriet to be released from the mortuary, to allow them to have a funeral.

In yet another crushing blow, they learned her body had not been preserved during that time, and had started to decompose. Inside her tiny white coffin was not the perfect newborn they had left at the hospital, but three black bin bags of remains.

‘They should have told us,’ Jack says. ‘What we’ve been through feels like being punched repeatedly in the face.’

And the heartbreak continued. Sarah and Jack suffered secondary infertility after Harriet’s death, so had to go through IVF to conceive again. The hospital setting was also triggering – Sarah was so emotionally scarred she couldn’t wear a hospital gown during egg collection.

When she fell pregnant in early 2019, she was petrified. The couple decided to go privately, with consultant-led care at the Lindo Wing, at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, where the Princess of Wales had her three children, using money borrowed from family.

They had multiple extra scans, weekly heartrate checks and refused to plan anything for Lottie’s birth – no clothes, toys or nursery – just in case their worst nightmare was repeated.

‘I’d planned an elective C-section, but Lottie decided to come early so I actually went into labour again,’ Sarah says.

‘I phoned up once and said, ‘I don’t feel right.’ They told me to come in straight away. That’s what the NHS should be doing.’

Today, Lottie knows all about her big sister. Once a year she helps her parents sing ‘happy heavenly birthday’ to Harriet and blows out a candle on her cake. Every Christmas she hangs a bauble bearing her name on the tree.

‘We talk about her quite often,’ Sarah says. ‘It’s difficult, you never know the right thing to do. We keep it clinical – Lottie knows she’s died, but we use phrases like ‘born sleeping’.

‘I tell her that the midwives and doctors didn’t look after mummy and Harriet very well, but the doctors who delivered Lottie did a good job.

‘I worry I get the balance wrong. I try to keep Harriet’s memory alive but not pass the trauma on. I get very upset about that.

‘The people who did this have stolen Lottie’s innocence, too. It’s not just me and Jack: she’s a four-year-old having to say to her friends, ‘I’ve got a sister, but she’s dead.’ ‘

Since losing Harriet, the couple have found some comfort in meeting others who have suffered similarly to them.

Sarah and Jack now head a group of hundreds of bereaved parents who, together, are fighting for wide-reaching changes to maternity care and convictions for those responsible for their babies’ deaths, many of whom have never been reprimanded and remain in their posts.

It is, explains Jack, ‘the most horrific community you could want to be part of’.

Their anger, eight long years on, is palpable. Some days they are overwhelmed by grief. Others, they feel nothing but numb.

‘Fighting for Harriet keeps her memory alive,’ says Sarah, who admits she can’t imagine a time when all this might be over.

‘I will do whatever I have to, for however long it takes, so that she is never forgotten.’

lMaternity: Broken Trust is on ITV1 & ITVX at 10.20pm tonight.