Hospital wrongly told patient she had miscarried

What happened

When Ms E was in the early stages of pregnancy, the Trust prescribed progesterone to support the pregnancy due to her history of miscarriages. She had regular blood tests to monitor the pregnancy. However, one of the blood tests presented low levels of progesterone, which is used to indicate the progression of a pregnancy. The Trust told Ms E that she had miscarried and that she should stop taking the progesterone.

The hospital later discovered that the blood test results were incorrect and that it should have reviewed and re-tested them. When the hospital re-tested the results it found the expected levels of progesterone. Ms E was confirmed to have miscarried a few days later.

Ms E complained that the error had resulted in the death of her unborn child and had caused her a great deal of distress.

What we found

It was evident that the Trust had failed to re-test the blood test result and instead gave Ms E incorrect results. The Trust had acknowledged and apologised for this.

We took advice from an experienced obstetrician/gynaecologist, to help us reach a view as to whether we could directly link the error with the death of the baby. From the evidence and our adviser's comments we could not say with any level of certainty that the error caused the death. There were indications that the foetus had not developed as well as expected before the error, and Ms E would have likely miscarried anyway. However, we concluded that the error had caused Ms E a lot of distress.

Putting it right

While the Trust had apologised and taken measures to prevent the same error occurring, we did not feel it had taken any action to acknowledge the distress caused. Therefore the Trust accepted our recommendation and paid Ms E £150 in recognition of the distress caused by the error.