Midwife-led units are ‘dangerous’ say parents of brain-damaged boy

The parents of a brain-damaged boy who won £6.4m from the NHS after being oxygen-starved during birth have warned of the dangers of midwife-led units.

Earnie and Janet Kramer told mothers-to-be to choose hospital maternity wards headed by a consultant because of what happened to their paralysed son Theo, who has up to 40 seizures a day, and cannot speak, because of errors by a student midwife.

He won a lump sum of £2.75 million and will get £235,000 until he is 19, and £275,000 a year after that. He was born unconscious at the Edgware Birth Centre in Burnt Oak in April 2002.

Mr Kramer, 48, who runs an IT business, told the Evening Standard newspaper: “We decided on the birth centre as it claimed all the best-trained midwives end up there as they don't work under a doctor. They also claimed their transfer rates to intensive care were the same as consultant-led units at hospital. Our legal team researched this further and found you are seven times as likely to end up in intensive care if you go to a midwife-led stand alone birth unit. If we had known this we would never have gone to one.”