Paramedic here, not a physician, though I did part of what would be considered medical school. From what it sounds like, there was trouble with the vaginal del

Paramedic here, not a physician, though I did part of what would be considered medical school. From what it sounds like, there was trouble with the vaginal delivery - either mother's birth canal was too small or there was a breech, cord issue, or even placenta previa (unlikely because if mother had been receiving neonatal care, this would have been identified) or abruptio placenta (where the placenta comes free of the uterine wall prematurely). Either way, the decision was made, more slowly than it should have, to perform a C-section, and a locum (fill-in) was to conduct the procedure (the fill-in part isn't inherently the problem, though it does mean they were likely unfamiliar with the patient). At some point in the process, between the complications of vaginal delivery and the C-section being completed (going off the 'coming out floppy'), the baby was likely starved of oxygen, likely to the point of needing resuscitation. The 'life saving tube' was most likely an ET tube for intubation and ventilation, but even for the most experienced obstetricians, paramedics, etc., intubation of a neonate is absurdly complicated, due to the tiny size of things (a neonate's trachea is about the same diameter as a pinkie finger, at most). If it took 26 minutes of attempting to place this (and who knows what mechanical ventilation was happening in the process, if any), then absolutely, that was a HUGE failure (for reference, in our protocols for working cardiac arrests, pauses to compressions for intubation placement are limited to TEN SECONDS. The average adult has sufficient oxygenation of the blood supply to last several minutes, but obviously the neonate has much less, and probably had near zero blood oxygenation by the time they were delivered and resuscitation efforts started). At the risk of armchair quarterbacking, if I'd had that much of an issue intubating, we would have gone with blow-by oxygen (if there was any spontaneous ventilation), holding a mask close to the face, or continuing manual ventilation with a bag valve mask alone, or attempted something close to an ET, like an I-gel, an invasive but less complex airway management device - if ET is considered the "gold" standard, then an SGA (supraglottic airway) would be a "silver" standard.