Alarm bells ring over AI use in Amos report

The news over the weekend that families’ testimony and evidence of birth trauma have not been accurately reflected or even positively ignored in the Amos report, potentially due to the use of AI, is cause for concern – to say the least.

Families question the report’s findings

It was reported in the Sunday Times that families have expressed worry that their evidence of complaints about normal birth ideology weren’t included in the Amos report. When the report was published in June, Baroness Amos concluded that “We did not find that normal birth ideology was currently widespread.” This was a view challenged by many including birth trauma campaigners and Dr Bill Kirkup.

What is normal birth ideology?

Normal birth ideology is the belief that a ‘natural birth’ produces the best outcomes. This means a birth which is unassisted, vaginal, and without pharmaceutical pain relief. This approach has been criticised in several reviews, which found that practices such as encouraging women to remain at home when they required medical attention and restricting access to caesarean sections contributed to preventable deaths and harm.

Concerns over AI use in the review

However, it’s now come to light through the campaigning of Rebecca Matthews, who co-founded the Oxford group of mothers that campaigned for their area’s NHS Trust to be included in the review, that the AI tool Co-Pilot was fed the over 10,000 submissions given to the inquiry and asked to identify themes across the submissions. Allegedly, it ignored the mentions of normal birth ideology in these submissions.

This news will cast a shadow over the Amos report and the next steps for our country’s maternity services.

Families must be heard

At the time of the Amos report, my colleague Claudia wrote a blog, and we discussed on the BBK Free Speech podcast our opinions of the report and concluded that the recommendations did not go far enough. We expressed concern that this inquiry, and the many inquiries and reports we have seen in recent years into maternity care, show a failure to properly listen to those impacted by poor maternity care. Families consistently feel like their concerns are dismissed and swept under the carpet. This news that testimonies were fed into AI and, importantly, these were potentially neglected from the review, will feel like another injustice to these families who have already suffered so much.

Rebecca Matthews has now written to Health Secretary Yvette Cooper, expressing concern, writing: “This means that the harm in Oxford has never been properly analysed. Lessons cannot have been captured, and women and babies in Oxfordshire remain at risk.”

Lessons cannot be learnt if all the evidence collected is not properly reflected in the subsequent report and recommendations. Families must be listened to. To do otherwise risks repeating the very failures that these investigations are intended to address. The voices of the families impacted were meant to be at the centre of the inquiry. To hear these have been ignored by AI being used instead of a human review is insult to injury and risks re-traumatisation all over again.