The recent case of Mrs Tebussum Ali heightens concerns over the standard of UK midwifery care.

Mrs Ali was late into her first pregnancy when she attended the Queen's Hospital, in Romford, Essex, in labour. Her family has complained that the care she received was unacceptable, which was accepted by the chief executive of Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Mrs Ali died when midwifery staff failed to spot that her uterus had ruptured during labour and she went into cardiac arrest. An emergency Caesarean was performed, but it wasn't possible to save her baby.

Mrs Ali never recovered from the brain injury that she had sustained as a result of a lack of oxygen to her brain following the cardiac arrest, and died five days later.

This is an extreme example of failings in the standard of midwifery care. The case has criticised the midwives concerned for their lack of care and attention.

There are, however, many maternity units where similarly catastrophic errors can arise, not because midwives don't aim to provide their patients with proper care, but because they simply lack the time and resources to be able to do so because services are overstretched and/or because they lack the appropriate training.

Medical negligence specialist Jo Carver is representing a client who alleges that her son was stillborn following a midwife's failure to respond to signs of her baby's fetal distress.

The client had attended a midwife assessment unit complaining of reduced fetal movements when 36 weeks' pregnant. The midwife arranged monitoring of the baby's heartbeat using a cardiotacograph machine (CTG), but she incorrectly recorded that the baby's heartbeat was normal, when in fact some abnormalities were evident on the CTG trace. Our client should have been admitted or referred to a doctor for further review but instead she was sent home.

Our client attended the same hospital three days later with the same concerns, but she was turned away because the delivery suite didn't have any room available. She went to another hospital where she was told that her baby's heartbeat could not be found. Shortly afterwards, an ultrasound scan confirmed that the baby had died. The hospital concerned initiated a Serious Untoward Incident investigation and this has raised concerns about the level of support and supervision provided to the midwife involved as well as the overstretching of midwives and midwife shortages.

For further information regarding child birth trauma or medical negligence claims in general, please visit our pages.

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