Mother demands Mater Dei Hospital record reform

A Maltese mother has written an open letter to Malta's health authorities calling for urgent changes to how patient records are updated across hospital departments when a baby dies. Her daughter was born at 24 weeks and two days of pregnancy and lived for four days. Eight months after the death, the mother received a phone call from the Department of Speech & Language at Mater Dei Hospital enquiring about a possible appointment for the child.

"I froze," she wrote. "For a split second, I forgot this wasn't real. Then reality hit me all over again."

The call was not isolated. In the months after her daughter died, the mother attended several follow-up appointments at Mater Dei Hospital. Each time, staff congratulated her on becoming a mother, not knowing the baby had died.

She had to tell them herself, repeatedly. "Every single time, I had to explain that my daughter had died," she wrote. "Those conversations broke my heart over and over again."

She does not blame individual staff members. The problem, as she describes it, is structural: departments at the same hospital working from records that were not updated when her daughter died, so the news never reached them. "No parent should have to relive the worst day of their life because one department wasn't informed that their child had passed away," she wrote.

In her letter, she frames the failures as a matter of compassion, dignity and respect for bereaved families – not merely an administrative error. "Please do better for the babies we lost and for the parents who carry them in their hearts every single day," she writes. She is asking for a specific reform: an automatic notification system that alerts all relevant services across the hospital the moment a baby's death is recorded.

This would prevent bereaved parents from receiving appointment calls, reminders or congratulatory messages that assume a living child. Mater Dei Hospital and Malta's health authorities had not published any response to the letter at the time of publication.