Inquest hears midwives and junior doctor failed to carry out simple resuscitation in Lancaster
Ida Lock suffered a serious head injury at or around the time of her delivery
Two midwives and a junior doctor failed to carry out a "simple resuscitation" of a poorly newborn girl, an inquest has heard.
Ida Lock is said to have sustained a serious brain injury, with reduced oxygen and blood supply, at or around the time of her delivery at Royal Lancaster Infirmary.
Expert neonatologist Dr Simon Mitchell said the infant's condition would have been reflected with an abnormally slow foetal heart rate - bradycardia - but it was not recognised.
He said there was no verifiable record of the foetal heart rate for 26 minutes before the birth.
Two midwives and a junior doctor then could not revive Ida for three-and-half minutes before a paediatric registrar attended and resuscitated her seconds later, the hearing at County Hall, Preston, was told.
Ida was transferred to intensive care at Royal Preston Hospital's neonatal unit where she died a week later on November 16 2019
Retired medic Dr Mitchell said: "I was struck by the ease with which Ida was resuscitated when the paediatric registrar got there, confirmed there was no visible chest movement and concluded the lungs were not inflated,
"One set of mask inflation breaths was then applied and that was all that was needed to restore the heart rate.
"That's a simple manoeuvre,"
He said an emergency crash call would have gone out if a foetal bradycardia had been noted and a full paediatric team would have been waiting to resuscitate Ida.
Dr Mitchell said he did not think effective resuscitation at birth would have made a difference to the newborn's survivability.
At the start of the inquest last week, Ida's parents Sarah Robinson and Ryan Lock, from Morecambe, Lancashire, described how they had endured "a rollercoaster of emotions" in a fight for answers from hospital bosses since Ida's birth.
Ms Robinson said there had been a "real sense of obstruction" from University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (UHMBT), which runs the hospital.
She compared an internal hospital report, which found no care delivery issues, to a later independent probe, which uncovered numerous failings, as "like night and day".
UHMBT, which in December 2024 accepted failings in Ida's delivery care, was the subject of a damning report in 2015 that found a "lethal mix" of problems at another of its maternity units at Furness General Hospital that led to the unnecessary deaths of 11 babies and one mother between 2004 and 2013.
The Morecambe Bay investigation, chaired by Dr Bill Kirkup, uncovered a series of failures "at every level" from the unit to those responsible for regulating and monitoring the trust.
The hearing continues.
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