Medic who performed emergency caesarean while drunk that killed Briton in France gets three years

Belgian medic Helga Wauters has been sentenced to three years for manslaughter

Credit: Telegraph

A French court on Thursday handed a three-year prison term to an alcoholic anaesthetist who botched an emergency caesarean operation that left a young British woman brain-dead.

Belgian Helga Wauters, 51, was found guilty of manslaughter over the death of Xynthia Hawke, who died four days after she pushed a breathing tube into the 28-year-old’s oesophagus instead of her windpipe.

As colleagues spoke of smelling alcohol on her breath, Wauters failed to react even when alarms rang, Ms Hawke turned blue, vomited, cried out in pain and went into cardiac arrest. 

Ms Hawke was overdue when admitted to the maternity ward of Orthez hospital near the southwestern city of Pau on September 26, 2014.

Her baby was born healthy on 26 September 2014, but she was left in an irreversible coma. The child is being brought up by his father, Yannick Balthazar, 39.

Belgian anaesthetist Helga Wauters had drunk the equivalent of 10 glasses of wine before arriving at work

Credit: GAIZKA IROZ/AFP

In court, Wauters, who was less than two weeks into the job, admitted drinking a mix of vodka and water, "like every day" for the previous 10 years.

The alcohol content in her blood that day was found to be 2.38 grammes per litre, which typically corresponds to close to 10 glasses of wine, and is more than four times the permitted level when driving in France.

Investigators found she had lost two previous jobs because of her alcoholism but she had not been reported to the Belgian Order of Medicine or prevented from working as a doctor. She was about to lose this one too.

She told the court: “I will regret this tragedy all my life. I carry the death of Xynthia Hawke with me every minute. I accept my responsibility but I do not think I merit going to prison.”

But while admitting “part of the responsibility” for the death, she blamed a faulty ventilator in the operating theatre for Hawke’s death. Experts later reported that the machine was in perfect working order.

A nurse on duty described the scene as being like a war zone.

"It was Baghdad," she said.

As well as handing her a three-year jail term, the court in Pau ordered Wauters to pay nearly 1.4 million euros (£1.26m) in damages to Hawke’s relatives.

"Justice has set an example for this type of doctor who, in my eyes, is not a doctor," said Ms Hawke’s partner Yannick Balthazar, who was present for the ruling.