FOUR times in seven days Premalatha Jeevagan needed urgent care as complication followed complication during the birth of her first child.

The accountancy student might have thought that she was in the right place — the maternity ward of a leading London hospital — but four times she failed to get the help she needed and, after a few minutes with her baby daughter, she was dead.

Her husband was, he said, reduced to screaming at the doctors who broke the news to him: “What are you guys doing?” Selvaratanam Jeevagan is one of ten men whose children have been left without mothers after three years during which the maternal death rate at Northwick Park hospital soared to more than five times the national average.

He lives in a quiet street within view of the new Wembley stadium. His daughter, Lathika, will be one next month. She sits on his knee in their front room, bewildered by The Times’s photographer’s flashbulb but too brave to cry.

Not so her father, who is no longer taking anti-depressants but is unsure whether he can handle going back to work on the London Underground. “You never recover from this,” Mr Jeevagan, 34, said. “You cry every day, you cry inside, even if others can’t see it.”

The latest tragedy linked to the Northwick Park maternity unit was last month when Anna Marie Denso, a Filipina nurse, died after surgery during childbirth. Doctors are believed to have removed her liver as well as her uterus.

One result is the legal case being prepared against the hospital by Mrs Denso’s husband, Andrew, with the help of the Philippines’ Ambassador to London. Another was the decision last week by John Reid, the Health Secretary, to put the unit on “special measures”. The hospital has been held responsible in only one of the nine deaths so far examined at coroners’ inquests — the case of Mrs Jeevagan.

Yet even the most complex and ambiguous case is deeply troubling. It ended in the death of Angela Shipperley, a Jehovah’s Witness, who told hospital staff in the 21st week of her pregnancy that she would not accept a blood transfusion because of her religious beliefs.

Twelve days after giving birth prematurely to her son, Joel, Mrs Shipperley was suffering from dangerously low haemoglobin levels. Told that a transfusion could save her life, she refused one again.

William Dolman, the coroner, noted at the inquest her “informed decision to refuse blood against medical advice”, but her widower, Alvin, is convinced that her death was avoidable.

Another treatment was available, Mr Shipperley contends: it was prescribed but not administered because of confusion over which variant of the drug would match his wife’s blood, although her blood type had been known for three months.

“The sad thing is it was only after my wife died that we started learning things about Northwick Park,” Mr Shipperley said. “I told people on my street that my wife had died after giving birth and they said — no prompting from me — ‘Northwick Park’.

“It’s too late for my wife, but we need answers and they need to get their act together so it doesn’t happen to others.”

Mr Shipperley, 43, is now a full-time father in Pinner, “constantly tired” but grateful for the support of two brothers and his church. He lives on his wife’s pension and death benefits, and the child benefit and child tax credit to which Joel entitles him.

“You learn to cut your cloth, don’t you?” he said. “I’ve never worked so hard, but it’s the best job I have ever had.”

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