Mother accused of stealing her own baby from hospital after getting caught up in abduction training exercise

Clare Bowker was confronted by hospital security officers, maternity ward staff and porters who accused her of kidnapping seven-week-old Hannah from a ward.

But the whole scare was part of a training routine and even police called to the drama were unaware of the "staged" abduction set up by hospital bosses.

Mix up: Clare Bowker with her daughter Hannah after their ordeal

The distraught 37-year-old was interrogated by police who searched her bag while hospital staff took 40 minutes to confirm that Hannah was the baby she had given birth to at the same hospital seven weeks earlier.

To add reality to the scare, blundering hospital bosses even sneaked a baby out of the ward - this time with the father's permission - so staff would think they had genuinely lost a baby.

Mrs Bowker suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and was left emotionally scarred after the ordeal. She only recovered after a year of counselling.

She has now been awarded a payout from the Good Hope Hospital, in Birmingham, for being targeted in the December 2005 training exercise.

Mrs Bowker agreed an undisclosed compensation deal for post traumatic stress and loss of earnings from the Heart of England Foundation Trust, which has since taken over management of the hospital.

But she wants other people to know what happened to her in the hope that hospital bosses think twice before targeting members of the public.

Her ordeal began when she took Hannah with her for her elder daughter Hollie's routine eye appointment at the hospital.

When she left the hospital grounds and got into her car she was confronted by staff who said she needed to verify who she was at the maternity ward.

Confused, she returned to the hospital with Hannah and Hollie, where she was told she was a suspect in the kidnapping of a child.

After four hours of uncertainty she was only told that the kidnapping alert was a fake when she received a call at home at around 2pm.

Mrs Bowker was stopped outside Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham

Mrs Bowker said: "It is an awful thing to be accused of and I want to make sure nobody else has to go through what I went through. I want people to know what happened and that this hospital and others do not do it in the future.

"It has been terrible and I have been deeply affected by this. It took a while for me to realise how badly, but being told that you had taken a baby and that your baby was not yours is awful.

"I think I am a strong person, but you can be quite vulnerable so soon after giving birth and if I had been suffering from post natal depression, like many mothers do, it would have been even worse.

"If somebody in management had approached me on the day and asked me to take part in some kind of exercise I probably would have done so. Instead they targeted me and the 40 minutes felt like hours.

"They clearly made no risk assessment, they didn't use actors and they also put the staff members through a very stressful ordeal too."

The former Aston University business conference centre manager, who is now a part-time support tutor at Sutton Coldfield College, added: "It has been dragging on for a long time and I just want to put it all behind me."

A spokeswoman for Good Hope Hospital said: "The safety of babies in our maternity unit is very important so we regularly carry out routine exercises to ensure our ward and security staff know what to do to prevent babies being unlawfully taken.

"Unfortunately, on one occasion back in 2005, there was a case of mistaken identity in which a member of the public, Mrs Bowker, was caught up in an exercise.

"A full investigation of the incident was carried out and we have apologised for this mistake and compensated Mrs Bowker for her inconvenience and embarrassment."