Civil claim follows newborn death after rare maternal bleed and brain injury
The parents of Olivia Trupiano are moving ahead with a civil claim against the NHS trust that ran the hospital where their daughter died five days after birth. Their case turns on a chain of events that began with severe abdominal pain in late pregnancy, then evolved into internal bleeding, emergency delivery, and severe hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy in the newborn. The inquest into Olivia’s death concluded that no aspect of care by University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust could be considered likely to have caused her death, yet her parents say they still need answers.
Olivia was born by emergency caesarean section at 34 weeks on 14 September 2024 at the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. Both mother and baby were later transferred to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, where Olivia died on 19 September. The central medical issue was a rare two-stage spontaneous rupture of the splenic artery at 34 weeks’ gestation, a catastrophic vascular event that can rapidly drain blood volume and compromise oxygen delivery to the fetus.
The physiology behind the catastrophic sequence
When maternal blood loss is abrupt and severe, placental perfusion can fall quickly. A fetus depends entirely on that circulation, so a sudden drop in maternal oxygen-carrying capacity and blood pressure can trigger profound fetal hypoxia before birth even occurs. In Olivia’s case, the resulting brain injury was described as hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy, a condition caused when the brain does not receive enough oxygen or blood flow around the time of birth. In practical terms, this is the kind of injury that can unfold within minutes and leave little margin for rescue once maternal collapse begins.
Newark said she had gone to hospital in what she described as “excruciating pain” and was told it was trapped wind. It later emerged that she was bleeding internally. During the inquest, the coroner found that her condition did not present typically, a point that matters clinically because rare vascular ruptures in pregnancy can mimic far more common and benign symptoms until they are far advanced. She was placed in a coma, then woke to learn her baby was not going to survive.
I went through being in a coma and waking up knowing that my baby wasn’t going to make it.
That sequence has shaped the way she remembers her daughter. Newark said the only memories she will carry are the moments she felt Olivia move at night, a deeply human account that sits beside the clinical record without replacing it. Families often live with both realities at once: the anatomical explanation and the emotional one, each incomplete on its own.
What the civil claim is seeking to answer
Ayesha Hussain of Slater and Gordon, which is representing the family, said the legal team is examining potential errors or missed opportunities that might have changed the outcome for baby Olivia. In medical negligence cases involving obstetric catastrophe, the focus often falls on whether symptoms were recognized early enough, whether escalation was timely, and whether a rare diagnosis was considered when common explanations no longer fit. In this case, the family is trying to establish whether a different sequence of assessment or intervention could have altered the trajectory before fetal brain injury became irreversible.
The trust has offered condolences and said it remains willing to meet with the family again. It also noted the coroner’s narrative conclusion and expressed regret that the inquest did not provide all the answers the family had hoped for. The gap between legal conclusion and parental understanding is often wide in cases like this, particularly when the injury arises from an uncommon obstetric emergency rather than a single obvious procedural failure.
Newark’s comment that families can become statistics lands with unusual force in this setting. This was not an abstract maternity case; it was a pregnancy that ended in maternal coma, emergency surgery, neonatal intensive care, and death within days. The medical facts are rare, but the bedside consequences are painfully familiar to obstetric and neonatal teams: sudden collapse, urgent transfer, a compromised newborn, and a family left reconstructing the sequence from fragments.
Independent review adds wider pressure on maternity services
In April, senior midwife Donna Ockenden was appointed to lead an independent review into maternity services at University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust, which also runs departments at Worthing Hospital and St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester. The review adds a broader institutional backdrop to Olivia’s case, placing this individual tragedy within a service already under scrutiny. For clinicians, independent reviews of maternity care tend to focus on delays in escalation, recognition of deterioration, staffing, communication, and continuity across sites — all factors that can become critical when symptoms are atypical and time is compressed.
Rare obstetric vascular rupture is difficult precisely because it can disguise itself as something ordinary before it becomes life-threatening. Abdominal pain in pregnancy is common; catastrophic hemorrhage is not. The diagnostic challenge is to know when the pattern has shifted from routine discomfort to emergency, and the cost of missing that shift can be measured in minutes rather than hours. Olivia’s case now sits at that intersection of rare pathology, emergency obstetrics, neonatal brain injury, and legal accountability.
What remains unresolved is whether earlier recognition of Newark’s bleeding could have changed the course before Olivia’s oxygen deprivation occurred. The inquest did not identify care that was likely to have caused the death, but the civil claim is likely to test a narrower question: whether any missed opportunity existed in a rapidly evolving emergency that presented in an unusual way. For the family, the legal process has become the only avenue left to search for a more complete explanation of how a pregnancy ended in such a devastating outcome.