NO PARENTS must ever face the trauma and torment that the parents of terminally ill baby Charlie Gard have been through, according to York man who has helped other families oppose medical opinions.

David Hayes has made a plea for an overhaul of systems which have left Charlie’s parents Connie Yates and Chris Gard facing High Court battles to get treatment for their son.

Mr Hayes, once a national vice chairman of disability charity Scope, said:

“I think no parents should suffer what they have suffered. There should be no repeat of this, but there will be unless something changes.”

Charlie’s parents gave up their legal fight to get their baby experimental therapy in the USA earlier this week, saying time had run out for him.

Yesterday they were back in court, in a bid to be allowed to take the 11 month old home to spend his last days together.

Mr Hayes has said the “dysfunctional” and “complicated” legal system Charlie’s family have faced as “got in the way” and not helped anyone.

Cases like his should be solved through discussion and cooperation, with mediation and not with lawyers intervening, he added.

“Legal action is not the answer. The answer is to get people around the table. The best place to resolve this is around the table.”

Mr Hayes does not agree that a judge with no lived experience of a situation like the Gards’ should make a decision over the case.

Mr Hayes also said his work meant he had met families who had been advised to switch off life support machines for their children, only to fight the advice and later see their children enjoy a good quality of life.

Charlie’s parents appear to have been marginalised in his case, he added.

“I am looking for a total ‘look again’ to stop this happening again. Until we manage to change it parents will go through this. It’s torment. They have to go through life thinking ‘if only someone had listened to us’.”

Mr Hayes, from Strensall, was misdiagnosed him as suffering with brain damage and cerebral palsy between the ages of two and five, but almost 50 years later experts discovered his condition was a congenital deformity of the knee and hip.