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Not every case comes down to medical error, but a provider's failure to meet the accepted standard of care can give parents grounds for a birth injury claim when that failure contributed to the injury. Sorting that out starts with reviewing the pregnancy, labor, delivery, and neonatal records in full.
A complete loss of oxygen to a newborn's brain before, during, or shortly after birth can cause anoxic brain damage and lead to permanent conditions including cerebral palsy, epilepsy, developmental delays, and intellectual impairment.
Medical experts evaluating a potential birth injury claim commonly examine whether providers recognized and responded appropriately to the following:
The presence of these complications does not establish negligence on its own, but each one represents a point in the delivery where the medical team's decisions come under review.
For eligible infants with moderate to severe HIE caused by oxygen deprivation, cooling therapy has become the standard treatment and should generally begin within six hours after birth. When a medical team fails to initiate cooling therapy within that window, or fails to identify a newborn as a candidate for it, that delay can become a significant issue in a birth injury claim.
Experts typically review prenatal care records, fetal heart monitoring strips, labor and delivery records, timing of cesarean delivery, umbilical cord blood gas results, Apgar scores, NICU records, brain MRI findings, placental pathology, and neurology consultations. These records help determine whether oxygen deprivation occurred and whether earlier intervention would likely have changed the outcome.
Anoxic brain injury cases require medical experts who can reconstruct the delivery timeline, identify where the standard of care was not met, and connect those failures directly to your child's injury. Attorney Sean M. Cleary reviews every case personally and works with the specialists needed to build that foundation.
If your child sustained anoxic brain damage and you believe a medical error played a role, contact The Law Offices of Sean M. Cleary today for a free case evaluation.