There are calls for full consultant-led maternity services to be reinstated at Grantham Hospital after an expectant mother was driven 80 miles to give birth.

Kathy Morris, who lives in Grantham, gave birth to a girl, Sinead, 15 weeks prematurely at a hospital in Stoke-on-Trent.

Sinead weighed just 1lb and 12oz and died a week later.

Mrs Morris' husband, Trevor, had already driven her from Grantham to Lincoln, but they were told there were no facilities available.

Health professionals

Mr Morris said: "She had a three-hour drive and could have gone into labour going backwards and forwards between Grantham and Lincoln.

"If the facilities had been available in Grantham I feel that Sinead would still be with us now."

One local politician who has taken up the case, rejected the idea maternity services could not return to Grantham.

The leader of the Labour group on South Kesteven District Council, John Hurst, said: "Health professionals who talk to me - and they talk very freely in private, but are too scared about their jobs to talk publicly - tell me that it is simply not the case, and services could readily return to Grantham.

Specialist facilities

"Quite apart from the deficiencies at Lincoln, it simply is not true these services can't come back and we must not allow ourselves to be talked into believing that."

Dr Alastair Scammell, the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust's clinical director for paediatrics, said: "The hospital is unable to care for babies under 28 weeks gestation.

"It is therefore better for these babies, if they are transferred to a hospital with specialist neonatal facilities before they are born."