Couple take legal action after daughter dies hours after birth
Liliwen Iris Thomas died in October 2022 just 20 hours after she was born at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff due to complications during labour.
Her parents, Emily Brazier and Rhodri Thomas, have launched a civil action against Cardiff and Vale University Health Board.
The couple, from Cardiff, who are also parents to daughter Carys and son Ellis, have spoken of the devastation at the loss of Liliwen.
They said Ms Brazier's pregnancy had been classed as high-risk and had been monitored accordingly during the antenatal period.
But when she went into labour she was left alone to give birth, they claim.
'I have very hazy memories of my labour but then I vividly remember peeling back the covers and seeing Liliwen there, completely still and lifeless,' she said.
'That image will be with me forever. I still have flashbacks and nightmares and have been in counselling since it happened.'
Mr Thomas said he was not present when Ms Brazier went into labour due to the maternity unit not allowing partners on the ward overnight, unless their partner was in active labour, which at the point of him leaving she was not.
'I should have been there, I could have been Emily's advocate,' he said.
'I would have pressed the call bell and alerted midwives that she was clearly in active labour and needed extra monitoring and help.'
Shortly before midnight on October 9, Ms Brazier said she was given pain relief and left with gas and air before stirring from her drowsiness after 2am to discover her daughter had been born.
'It was absolute panic from that point, they took Liliwen away and rushed me up to the delivery suite, I had lost a lot of blood and needed stitches, IV fluids and a blood transfusion,' she said.
'All this happened while I was still on the induction ward, with only curtains around my bed separating me from four other women. It must have been horrendous for them too.'
Liliwen was treated in the neonatal intensive care unit but died later that day.
Since her death Ms Brazier, who at the time was studying to be a nurse, has opted against a career in the profession and has been diagnosed with PTSD.
'So many happy memories and special family moments are tinged with sadness,' she said.
'I dread family events and Christmas as Liliwen will never be there, she will always be the missing piece.
'I look at the faces of my living children and long to know what Liliwen would look like now at two-and-a-half years old. I will never get over her death, I feel stuck in time.
'I will never be the same person again. Holding your child as they take their last breath, leaving them behind after their last ever cuddle, walking out of the hospital with an empty car seat, there are so many painful memories seared into my brain.
'I have lost my child; it's every parent's worst nightmare and we live the nightmare every single day.'
The couple are being supported in their case by lawyers Slater and Gordon.
Lara Bennett, a senior associate at the firm, said: 'We are supporting Emily and Rhodri in every way we can to secure justice for their daughter after the most unimaginable and traumatic ordeal.'
A spokeswoman for the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board said: 'Our sincere thoughts and heartfelt condolences remain with Liliwen's family during this incredibly difficult time.
'The health board is fully engaged with the inquest process and it would be inappropriate to comment further until the inquest concludes.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Edinburgh University's ‘skull room' highlights its complicated history with racist science
Hundreds of skulls are neatly and closely placed, cheekbone to cheekbone, in tall, mahogany-framed glass cabinets. Most carry faded, peeling labels, some bear painted catalogue numbers; one has gold teeth; and the occasional one still carries its skin tissue. This is the University of Edinburgh's 'skull room'. Many were voluntarily donated to the university; others came from executed Scottish murderers; some Indigenous people's skulls were brought to Scotland by military officers on expeditions or conquest missions. Several hundred were collected by supporters of the racist science of phrenology – the discredited belief that skull shape denoted intelligence and character. Among them are the skulls of two brothers who died while studying at Edinburgh. Their names are not recorded in the skull room catalogue, but cross-referencing of matriculation and death records suggests they were George Richards, a 21-year-old medic who died of smallpox in 1832, and his younger brother, Robert Bruce, 18, a divinity scholar who died of typhoid fever in 1833. Exactly how the Richards brothers' skulls came to be separated from their bodies, recorded as interned in the South Leith parish church cemetery, is unknown. But they were almost certainly acquired by the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to study supposed racial difference. Researchers believe their case exemplifies the challenging questions facing the university, which, it has now emerged, played a pivotal role in the creation and perpetuation of racist ideas about white superiority and racial difference from the late 1700s onwards – ideas taught to thousands of Edinburgh students who dispersed across the British empire. University records studied by Dr Simon Buck suggest the brothers were of mixed African and European descent, born in Barbados to George Richards, an Edinburgh-educated doctor who practised medicine on sugar plantations and who owned enslaved people – possibly including George and Robert Bruce's mother. Edinburgh Phrenological Society's 1858 catalogue records the skulls (listed as No 1 and No 2) as having belonged to 'mulatto' students of divinity and medicine. 'It can be assumed that the racialisation of these two individuals as 'mulatto' – a hybrid racial category that both fascinated and bewildered phrenologists – is what aroused interest among members of the society in the skulls of these two students,' Edinburgh's decolonisation report concludes. The brothers' skulls are among the roughly 400 amassed by the society and later absorbed into the anatomical museum's collection, which now contains about 1,500 skulls. These are held in the Skull Room, to which The Guardian was granted rare access. Many of these ancestral remains, the report states, 'were taken, without consent, from prisons, asylums, hospitals, archaeological sites and battlefields', with others 'having been stolen and exported from the British empire's colonies', often gifted by a global network of Edinburgh alumni. 'We can't escape the fact that some of [the skulls] will have been collected with the absolute express purpose of saying, 'This is a person from a specific race, and aren't they inferior to the white man',' said Prof Tom Gillingwater, the chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, who now oversees the anatomical collection. 'We can't get away from that.' The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by George Combe, a lawyer, and his younger brother, Andrew, a doctor, with roughly a third of its early members being physicians. Both were students at the university, and some Edinburgh professors were active members. Through its acquisition of skulls from across the globe, the society played a central role in turning the 'science' of phrenology, which claimed to decode an individual's intellect and moral character from bumps and grooves on the skull, into a tool of racial categorisation that placed the white European man at the top of a supposed hierarchy. George Combe's book, The Constitution of Man, was a 19th-century international bestseller and the Combe Trust (founded with money made from books and lecture tours promoting phrenology) endowed Edinburgh's first professorship in psychology in 1906 and continues to fund annual Combe Trust fellowships in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Phrenology was criticised by some of Edinburgh's medical elite for its unscientific approach. But some of its most vocal critics were nonetheless persuaded that immutable biological differences in intelligence and temperament existed between populations, a study by Dr Ian Stewart for the university's decolonisation report reveals. These included Alexander Monro III, an anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh medical school, who lectured 'that the Negro skull, and consequently the brain, is smaller than that of the European', and Robert Jameson, a regius professor of natural history, whose lectures at the university in the 1810s included a hierarchical racial diagram of brain size and intelligence. Despite the fact that phrenology was never formally taught at Edinburgh, and its accuracy was heavily contested by Edinburgh academics, the skull room, which is closed to the public, was built partly to house its collection by the then professor of anatomy Sir William Turner, when he helped oversee the construction of its new medical school in the 1880s. Among its reparatory justice recommendations of Edinburgh's investigation is that the university provide more support for the repatriation of ancestral remains to their original communities. This, Gillingwater suggested, possibly underplays the complexities involved – even for cases such as the Richards brothers. He regards the circumstantial evidence in their case as 'strong' but says it does not meet the forensic threshold required for conclusive identification. 'From a legal perspective, it wouldn't be watertight,' said Gillingwater. 'I would never dream of returning remains to a family when I didn't know who they definitely were.' Active engagement surrounding repatriation is taking place in relation to several of the skulls from the phrenology collection; more than 100 have already been repatriated to their places of origin. But each case takes time building trust with communities and in some cases navigating geopolitical tensions over which descendent community has the strongest claim to the remains. 'To look at perhaps repatriation, burials, or whatever, it's literally years of work almost for each individual case,' said Gillingwater. 'And what I found is that every individual culture you deal with wants things done completely differently.' Many of the skulls will never be identified and their provenance is likely to remain unknown. 'That is something that keeps me awake at night,' said Gillingwater. 'For some of our skulls, I know that whatever we do, we're never going to end up with an answer.' 'All I can offer at the minute is that we just continue to care for them,' he added. 'They've been with us, many of them, for a couple of hundred years. So we can look after them. We can care for them. We can treat them with that dignity and respect they all deserve individually.'
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Why Liverpool should NOT prioritise Alexander Isak - here's what they should do instead, writes LEWIS STEELE
Maturing is getting excited about the gifts you need rather than those you want. On Christmas or birthdays, kids would sniff at the idea of socks or new school equipment… it was that latest PlayStation game or that new gadget that all their mates were starting a playground craze for.
Powys County Times
a day ago
- Powys County Times
Kirsty Williams to leave Powys health board for Cardiff role
FORMER Powys Senedd member Kirsty Williams is to leave her role as vice chair of Powys Teaching Health Board (PTHB), to become the new chair of Cardiff & Vale University Health Board later this year. Ms Williams, a former Welsh politician who was a Member of the Senedd (MS) from its inception in 1999, until 2021, has been vice chair of Powys' health board since 2022. She will start her new role with Cardiff & Vale University Health Board on October 1, after being hand selected for the role by health secretary Jeremy Miles. It was announced in June that Mr Miles had picked Ms Williams, the former long-time MS for Brecon and Radnor, as his preferred candidate for the role as Cardiff & Vale chair; the announcement of her appointment followed in July, after a pre-appointment hearings by the Senedd's health and social care committee on July 3. 'Whilst excited to join Cardiff & Vale University Health Board as the new chair, I will of course be sad to leave Powys Teaching Health Board,' said Ms Williams. 'It has been a joy and a privilege to serve as vice chair. Over the past three and a half years I have been inspired every day by the dedication of the staff, who continually strive to offer the very best service for local people. 'I am grateful to each and every one of them.' Carl Cooper, Chair of PTHB, added: 'On behalf of our board, I am delighted to congratulate my vice chair (and) colleague, Kirsty Williams, on her well-deserved appointment as chair of Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. 'Kirsty has a very distinguished record of public service in Powys and in Welsh Government. 'She is an impressively skilled and experienced person whose insightful knowledge and expertise have helped to hone the effective governance within Powys Teaching Health Board. 'She is highly respected within the board by independent and executive members alike. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with her for nearly three years. Help support trusted local news Sign up for a digital subscription now: As a digital subscriber you will get Unlimited access to the County Times website Advert-light access Reader rewards Full access to our app 'We will miss her colleagueship and incisive contribution, and we assure her and Cardiff and Vale University Health Board of our warmest wishes as she prepares to take up her new responsibilities.' Ms Williams previously served as minister for education in the the Welsh Government from 2016 to 2021. She was also leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats from December 2008 to May 2016 and from June to November 2017 in an acting capacity.
