{"id":524321,"date":"2026-07-13T19:27:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/524321\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T19:27:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:27:15","slug":"inquest-hears-emergency-medical-technician-wouldnt-handle-fatal-birth-any-differently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/524321\/","title":{"rendered":"Inquest hears emergency medical technician wouldn’t handle fatal birth any differently"},"content":{"rendered":"

An emergency medical technician has told an inquest even with the benefit of hindsight, she wouldn’t have handled a birth where a 33-year-old woman later died any differently.<\/p>\n

Maria Hiune Pirihira Neho was 39-weeks pregnant when she went into cardiac arrest and died after her uterus ruptured during a home birth in February 2023. Her baby also died.<\/p>\n

An inquest into the deaths started last week and will hear from those involved in Neho’s labour, from her midwife to responding St John staff, Waikato Hospital staff and experts.<\/p>\n

St John’s Emma Pirecki told Coroner Ian Telford in Hamilton on Monday an offer for a paramedic was denied by Neho’s midwife<\/a> when she arrived at the scene with another EMT.<\/p>\n

But then when she saw the patient, she described her as someone experiencing 10 out of 10 excruciating pain and distress.<\/p>\n

“She’s crying, guarding, quiet. Not conversing like you normally would with questions… it’s like you’re overwhelmed with pain. You can’t possibly do anything other than feel this pain.<\/p>\n

“I wouldn’t have said personally that is a normal presentation. I do agree with people in pain and restless in labour. There are going to be some similarities, but there wasn’t any stopping. It was continuous.”<\/p>\n

Neho then collapsed due to what was thought to be a seizure and Pirecki called for more help.<\/p>\n

Space constraints meant they had to get Neho into a transfer chair and out of the house before being moved onto a stretcher and it was then when the mother of three went into cardiac arrest.<\/p>\n

CPR began in the ambulance and Pirecki was asked if at a point she felt the situation was “too big” for the pair of EMTs and the midwives.<\/p>\n

She said they were trained to deal with cardiac arrests but said “in that moment, I realised, man I wish she was in hospital. I still was aware that I’m trained to do my job and you deal with what you have.”<\/p>\n

Pirecki said even with the benefit of hindsight she wouldn’t have managed the scene any differently.<\/p>\n

“This is definitely one of those jobs that you reflect constantly and you think, could I have done this, what could we have done? But I still have come to the same point.”<\/p>\n

She said in a perfect world the scene would have been different, but it wasn’t, and they had to deal with the realities of the situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An emergency medical technician has told an inquest even with the benefit of hindsight, she wouldn’t have handled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-524321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}