A surgeon sliced open a baby’s head as she was being delivered by caesarian section at a north hospital.
And the infant’s distraught mother had to wait 24 hours for a plastic surgeon to travel from Aberdeen to stitch her newborn’s wound.
The blunder left Emma Edwards’s daughter Karmen with a one-and-a-half-inch scar between her eye and ear and is now being probed by health chiefs.
The locum doctor who made the incision claimed she had not been told Ms Edwards was in labour as she performed the procedure.
The traumatic incident – which followed a series of upsetting delays to the section itself – has left Ms Edwards furious and seeking answers.
The 21-year-old said the mistake could have had far more serious consequences – and claimed the care she and her baby received had been a “disaster from the start to the end”.
Ms Edwards was initially booked into Raigmore Hospital in Inverness for a caesarean section on the morning of Thursday, June 16, because of the large size of her baby in scans.
She travelled from her home in Wick on the Wednesday with her partner George McPhee, 26.
She said: “We went to the hospital on Thursday morning, about 8am. The hours kept passing and kept passing. Eventually at 5pm they said ‘we can’t do it because there are too many emergencies’.
“Then they promised me it would be first thing on Friday morning, so we stayed overnight again.
“Nobody came to me until about 12pm that day, then they cancelled again.”
The family returned to Wick on the Friday night before having to travel back to Inverness on the Sunday evening so she could have her baby on the Monday morning.
But at 3am her waters broke, and she went to Raigmore three hours later.
She said: “When I went in I passed on to the midwife that my waters had broken at 3am and I was in a lot of pain, I was contracting, but they didn’t look me over.
“At 10am I was ready. I went down for my section and everything was fine until after they delivered the baby.
“They rushed her off to SCBU (special care baby unit) because they had cut her head. It was about four centimetres long on, between her eye and ear.”
Ms Edwards added: “The surgeon came and spoke to me afterwards and said that it happened because I hadn’t told anyone that my waters had broken and was in labour, but I checked my medical records and it said that I had explained that.”
The cut on the baby’s head was not stitched up until the following day because the hospital had to wait for a plastic surgeon to arrive from Aberdeen.
“It was just a disaster from the start to the end,” said Ms Edwards.
“There’s a maternity unit right on my front doorstep but they just can’t do anything. My family had to travel down on the Thursday and then they had to travel back and then down again. It’s expensive.”
She added that NHS Highland bosses had contacted her last week about the incident.
She said: “They want a meeting to speak about what happened. They’re launching an investigation into the surgeon because she doesn’t work for NHS Highland. She was a locum.”
A health board spokesman said: “NHS Highland does not comment on individual cases. We are carrying out an internal investigation into this incident.”
Details of the blunder emerged amid an ongoing controversy over expectant mums from Caithness having to travel more than 100 miles to Inverness to give birth.
The threshold for sending mothers to Raigmore was lowered last year after a baby girl died of the e.coli sepsis infection just 40 hours after being born at Caithness General Hospital in Wick.
A recent study of almost 900 women who underwent C-sections showed that between 1.5% to 1.9% of the infants experienced cuts.
Nicola Sinclair, secretary of the Caithness Health Action Team campaign group, said it was a “very distressing” case which “really highlights the dangers of cutting services to remote areas”.