Ashford couple’s distress as baby is registered to wrong mum at William Harvey Hospital, Kent

An Ashford family have been left in despair after blundering hospital staff registered their new-born baby to the wrong mum.

Zara Dadd, 26, and Simon Branchett, 28, from South Ashford, were delighted to welcome 6lb 6oz baby Riley into the world at 7pm last Tuesday, but their joy soon turned to frustration.

The pair returned to the William Harvey Hospital the next day to sort out his registration details but were taken aside by nurses.

Mr Branchett said: “They sat us down and said unfortunately there had been a massive cock-up and they had registered the baby to my partner’s twin sister.”

Due to an admin error, thought to be made even before the baby was born, all Riley’s medical notes and details are instead registered to his mum’s identical twin sister, Charlene.

Mr Branchett added: “Now there’s no real record of his birth and they’ve told us it’s going to take weeks to rectify the problem.

VIDEO: The couple have been left in despair after the hospital mix-up

“The person who is supposed to be fixing it is on holiday now and we can’t even get a birth certificate for our son because of their huge error. To be fair to them, the staff couldn’t apologise enough, but we want to get this sorted.”

Luckily Riley is healthy but the couple, who already have 18-month-old daughter Amelia, said if he became unwell the hospital would have no record of him.

Mr Branchett added: “Mistakes like this shouldn’t happen. It’s scary really, this is how kids get swapped at birth.

“All we could think was ‘what if we have the wrong baby?’ My partner has been worried sick.

“We are so angry. It’s such a stupid mistake to make and it has caused a huge problem."

He continued: “They need to be making sure that they’re checking these records right.

“It’s scary to know that these mistakes can be made and go unnoticed for so long.

“We want to see what the hospital are going to do to make this right and what steps they’ll take to not make it happen again.”

Mum Zara added: “It definitely puts me off giving birth there again, it’ll be a home birth next time.”

A spokesperson for East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust said: “We are contacting the family to apologise for this administrative error on one of our internal systems and explain that it was corrected on our system the day after the baby was born.

'The error involved one digit input wrongly into the maternity unit number on our system'

“The error involved one digit input wrongly into the maternity unit number on our system.

“We have several systems to identify babies with their mothers; for example, we place a wristband on the baby at birth to link the baby to his or her mother, as well as entering details onto a separate computer system which contains information about our patients such as name, age, address and date of birth.

“Recording information correctly is extremely important in the care we provide.

"This issue was due to human error and are looking into how it happened, and actions to take to ensure our processes are robust.”