A senior obstetrician says two babies went into cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated last year at the Women's and Children's Hospital while waiting to be transported to Melbourne for surgery.
Associate Professor John Svigos is a part of the Women's and Children's Hospital Alliance, a body set up by staff concerned about conditions at the facility.
He gave evidence to a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, voicing his concerns about the ongoing lack of a paediatric cardiac surgeon at the hospital.
"Both these babies were waiting to be transferred to Melbourne," Dr Svigos said.
"Unfortunately, both of them were babies that were already suffering as a result of their cardiac condition at the time and [these small babies] both suffered cardiac arrests on the spot [while] waiting for the surgeon to fly over from Melbourne to stabilise the babies to be able to transfer them back to Melbourne for the cardiac surgery."
Giving evidence to a parliamentary committee, Dr Svigos said the babies were resuscitated but the two "near misses" came after four babies died waiting to be flown to Melbourne for cardiac surgery in 2020.
While the lack of an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine was blamed, in part, for the four deaths, the hospital now has the device.
However, Dr Svigos told the committee the hospital still lacked a specialist surgeon to help operate it.
"The danger of that is, if those fine vessels that you've hooked up to the lungs of the baby fail, they need a cardiac surgeon to re-implant them," Dr Svigos said.
"The baby can't wait for someone to fly over from Melbourne to do it and we don't have any locally trained paediatric cardiac surgeons available to help us with that.
"They cobbled one (procedure) together, I understand, at the beginning of the year. They tried it on one baby and that baby died," Dr Svigos said.
Claims another baby died taken 'on notice'
Executive director of medical services at the Women's and Children's Hospital Gavin Wheaton told the committee the ECMO machine had been "a very successful exercise".
"There have been a number of children and babies now who have benefited from a really excellent service," Dr Wheaton said.
He took questions about Dr Svigos's allegations of a baby's death on notice.
Dr Svigos told the committee that morale at the hospital was low and, despite an investigation into the four deaths in 2020, staff felt little had been done after the four deaths, despite an investigation.
"Other than depression of the staff who put in (incident reports) [which] were ignored, that's a repercussion. No other repercussions," he said.
"That report was heavily redacted. You could hardly read it. It was difficult to get any information from it.
"The (reports) were ignored on a technicality and, as a consequence, we never found out why those babies died."
The Women's and Children's Hospital has been under fire recently after it lost training accreditation for its paediatric intensive care unit, and only received conditional approval for the training program in its neonatal intensive care unit.
Dr Svigos told the committee he was not surprised by the accreditation outcome.
"Go and walk in the Women's and Children's Hospital and see. It's like a developing country's hospital," he said.
"It's got a potential to impact on (patient care) but, if you're asking me to spit it out, I can't do it. It's hurtful to even admit it."
Hospital management said it was already working on the issues raised in the accreditation report by recruiting more staff and planning physical improvements to the facilities.
"I'd like to reassure the community that the Women's and Children's Hospital continues to provide high quality, safe care to its patients," chief executive Lindsay Gough told the committee."
