LOSING ELLIE

Ellie Toyoshima, who took seven years to be conceived, lived for just six days. She was perfect, from the thick black hair on her head to the pearl-sized toes on her feet. Ellie died because her brain was starved of oxygen during labour and the damage that resulted was so profound doctors said she would spend the rest of her life on a ventilator. It was damage that could, and should, have been avoided.

Ellie had the misfortune to be born in a hospital maternity unit that was understaffed and equipped with monitoring machines that weren’t working properly. She might have survived, even then, had her midwife and a hospital obstetrician not failed her in a number of ways. The midwife did not take measurements of the mother and unborn child’s health at crucial times, was unsure how to interpret problematic results and delayed calling for help at a critical time. The obstetrician failed to do the proper tests, was also confused about the significance of fetal heart rate readings and did not intervene quickly enough to safely deliver her by caesarean section.

For five days, after the disaster of her delivery and transfer into intensive care but before the devastating results of the MRI scan on her brain, Ellie’s parents, Ruth and Kazu Toyoshima, hoped for the best. “We knew it was potentially bad but we didn’t know how bad,” says Ruth. “The scan showed she was pretty much brain-dead. We thought the most humane and best thing for her would be to die, because that was no life for her to live.”

After Ellie was taken off life support, the Toyoshimas held their dying child, conceived by IVF after all those excruciating years of “unexplained infertility”, until she took her last breath an hour or so later. “She was precious to us from the moment she was conceived,” Ruth says. “Words can’t describe how happy we were to have her.”

In December 2019, more than three years after Ellie’s birth, the Health and Disability Commissioner (HDC) has released a scathing report into her death, finding the Hutt Valley District Health Board failed to ensure its staff were supported well enough to provide safe and appropriate care. It found the obstetrician in breach of the Code of Patient Rights, and made adverse comment about the midwife’s performance.

Ellie’s death is one of four complaints the HDC has been considering recently related