Inquest on death of baby to begin
A NEWBORN baby died of massive brain damage a few hours after doctors at a Kowloon hospital used a vacuum device to suck it from its mother's birth canal, an inquest will hear this week.
Expert sources said the boy survived for nine hours before dying at the United Christian Hospital on May 8 last year.
Eight doctors are likely to be called to give evidence concerning events leading up to and following the late-afternoon delivery when the coroner's inquest begins on Tuesday.
The hospital's delivery team is reported to have induced labour on May 7, but ran into difficulty when the baby became stuck in the mother's birth canal.
Doctors applied the suction cup of a Ventouse vacuum machine to the crown of the unborn child's head in an attempt to pull it free.
A suction delivery involves placing a 7.5-centimetre diameter cap on the baby's scalp and ''sucking'' the baby out with pressure from an attached tube and vacuum machine. If too much pressure is used, the device can tear the scalp away from the skull bone and cause bleeding.
The United Christian Hospital's acting chief executive, Dr Tse Chun-yan, said last week the doctor involved was still working in his usual capacity, delivering babies.
The hospital's corrected perinatal mortality rate - the number of babies who die despite being of normal weight and showing no extreme malformations - was 7.17 in 1,000 births during 1992.
The figure compared well with other major Hong Kong hospitals, Dr Tse said.
