The findings, while devastating, did not come as a shock to the Iskanders.
“When it is your first pregnancy, you leave your care in the hands of experts. You trust them,” Danielle said. “But from day one, we received very mixed and confusing messages from the hospital.”
The Iskanders and Mia in hospital after the delivery.
The couple remember being told Danielle required an emergency cesarean, but rather than being rushed to the operating theatre, all they remember is waiting.
“We weren’t too stressed because we thought obviously if it was an emergency, they would rush me into surgery,” Danielle said.
The first inclination that something was seriously wrong would come when Stephen was sitting outside the operating theatre waiting to be brought in to hold his newborn daughter, and he heard a message blare over the PA system.
“They were calling a neonatal code blue,” Stephen said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I’m seeing people running in, but nobody is telling me what’s going on.”
The hours that followed Mia’s birth are a blur. They remember seeing Mia in a knitted beanie, wrapped in a blanket, with wires all over her tiny body, and taking photos of her to send to their family.
The couple said they were not told the severity of the situation until an infant emergency team arrived to take the critically ill Mia to another hospital.
“When they told us to prepare for the worst and say goodbye to Mia, we were just completely blindsided,” Danielle said. “There are no words to explain that moment.”
Mia died less than eight hours after she was born.
An independent expert, senior obstetric clinician Jeremy Chin, examined the case and found Mia’s heart rate should have been treated as a red flag for “significant fetal compromise” that required immediate management.
However, Chin found that while a quicker delivery may have seen Mia delivered in a less severe state of oxygen deprivation, she was suffering from a perinatal infection that was “ultimately overwhelming”.
Danielle had been previously hospitalised and was receiving ongoing antibiotic treatment for a bacterial infection, which had progressed to an infection in the baby.
The coroner found Danielle’s treatment by the hospital before the day of Mia’s delivery was reasonable and appropriate.
The official cause of Mia’s death was found to be complications of a uterine infection in the setting of premature pre-labour rupture of membranes.
Northern Health management declined to comment when contacted by The Age.
“As this matter is currently before the courts, we are unable to comment at this time,” a spokesperson said.
The Iskanders said they were speaking out to prevent their tragedy from happening to another family.
They also said a lack of mental health care and lack of support shown by the hospital after the ordeal had further traumatised them.
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“We were just left to deal with it all on our own,” Danielle said.
“Every time we called the hospital, they were like, ‘why are you calling us? You’ve already had your baby?’ We would have to explain, yes, I had the baby, but the baby died.”
They called for reform in the healthcare system after several other deaths of babies and children in Victorian hospitals.
On July 1, last year, they gave birth to another daughter, Maddison.
“It was bittersweet,” Danielle said. “We were so happy, but there is still so much grief about Mia.”
Mia’s death is one of a number of hospital deaths of young children or babies being investigated by Victorian coroners.
Last year, an inquest into the death of a 19-month-old Victorian toddler Noah Souvatzis in 2021 found his death was preventable.
Noah died on December 30, 2021, from meningitis. The coroner found that the toddler was discharged after an inadequate review by an under-trained, junior locum doctor on his first shift.
Latrobe Regional Hospital is also facing calls for an independent inquiry after it was revealed several patients, including infants, had died or experienced serious harm.
