Deaths during pregnancy and childbirth are at a near 20-year high in the UK, researchers have warned.

Experts have said the figures raise “further concern” about maternity services and have called for pre-pregnancy health and personalised care to be “prioritised as a matter of urgency”.

This is one family’s story.

The sister of a woman who died after giving birth to a healthy baby girl has told Sky News she feels “very, very cheated” after losing her.

Susie McLoughlin, 32, suffered a cardiac arrest following a caesarean section to deliver her fourth child, Leila, in 2019.

She’d been diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension just nine days before she gave birth.

The rare condition causes high blood pressure in the heart and lungs, and increases the likelihood of a patient’s death.

Her sister, Wendy Lunt, said: “I feel very, very cheated of losing such an important family member and I feel like there’s no justification for it because there were so many missed opportunities which were found in the inquest.

“How many times she’d presented herself to the medical profession and saying ‘something’s not right, I’m not okay’ and they are like, ‘you’re fine’, basically getting brushed off as if she was a hypochondriac.”

When her sister’s condition was discovered she was transferred from Aintree Hospital in Liverpool to a specialist unit at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield.

Ms McLoughlin gave birth at 36 weeks with her sister by her side in theatre.

Ms Lunt said: “I said ‘everything’s fine, babe, everything’s fine’ and then she took a deep breath and that was it, she just didn’t breathe, she went straight into cardiac arrest.

“It was the most horrible, bizarre feeling I’ve ever felt in my life when they told me to get out because she’d gone into cardiac arrest and then put this brand new baby in my arms.

“I said, ‘you’re going to have to take the baby off me, I’m scared to hurt her’, I was so upset.

“I didn’t want the baby’s first feelings to be of someone who was upset because it was a different kind of upset.”

She said Leila was “the little girl that Susie had always wanted”, after having three boys.

Ms Lunt said: “She was such a good mum, her kids were her world.”

In 2021, an inquest found doctors missed a number of opportunities to investigate and treat Ms McLoughlin’s heart condition sooner.

Ms Lunt said she was “not shocked” by new figures showing that the number of women dying during pregnancy or soon after childbirth had reached the highest level in almost 20 years.

“I’m not shocked as the NHS is just under so much pressure, but I just don’t think there’s enough checks, enough appointments,” she said.

“Your body goes through a miraculous change during pregnancy then during birth, then the body is doing a massive change after birth.

“I just don’t understand how medicine can change but managing a patient can’t.”

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