She said: “He [the doctor] came towards me and he confirmed my worst fears and said, ‘Sorry mum, we’ve lost her’.

“All I could think was that I was no longer a mummy, as Hayley was my only child, and she was dead.

“The treatment has led me to question – how can the staff at Birmingham Children’s Hospital fail Hayley so abominably?”

Ms Stevenson tearfully recalled the moment she broke the tragic news to her husband Bobby, who was in Australia.

“I cuddled Hayley up in my arms and then called my husband Bobby in Australia,” she said.

“I told him his little baby girl was dead. I held the phone to Hayley’s ear and told him to say goodbye, because she was still warm.”

Ms Stevenson later claimed her mum Sylvia, 61, committed suicide in November last year because she was so distraught over her granddaughter's death.

She said: “There were two casualties here. Mum died when Hayley died. Everything broke down.”

Pathologist Dr Tamas Marton said Hayley’s death was caused due to a failure of her heart to pump blood to the lungs.

This failure can sometimes be caused by a collapsed lung which could have been the case with the infant, he added.

Dr Oliver Stumper, a consultant paediatric cardiologist who saw Hayley the day before she died, said: “Though she was in respiratory distress, I felt we had taken the right steps to make her better.”

(proceeding)