ABSTRACT
A 21-year-old Sri Lankan woman who had given birth to her first baby was adamant in her evidence that at no stage during her admission did the midwives explain how to breastfeed her baby. The baby went home with his parents, and he continued to cry through the night, irrespective of his mother's efforts to breastfeed. A midwife who visited him at home discovered the baby to be pale and lethargic. The court found that the devastatingly simple cause was attributable to the baby's mother having no knowledge of how to breastfeed, and crucially, no knowledge of what to do if there was poor feeding. The court also found that the discharge process had been conducted without interpretation facilities for the mother. No clinician can assume that apparently intuitive, instinctive acts such as feeding a baby are necessarily adequately understood by the patient.
