Interim report from Baroness Amos finds both significant and alarming maternity care failings

Baroness Amos, chair of the review into maternity care set up by Health Secretary Wes Streeting has today produced an interim report, the findings of which are both alarming and hugely concerning.

The review comes in the wake of countless scandals afflicting maternity care units across the country, including units at NHS Trusts in Sussex, Oxford, Leeds, East Kent, Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury and Telford, and Nottingham, strengthening the growing picture nationally that maternity care is in crisis.

Having met so far with over 400 families and received evidence from over 8000 people, Baroness Amos focuses on six key areas in her interim report, highlighting the following issues:

• Services depleted or stopped due to capacity pressures, with antenatal wards and delivery units stretched resulting in delays in admissions and the deployment of community midwives in delivery units impacting safety.
• “Poor relationships” between obstetricians and midwives and racist and bullying behaviour on the part of senior clinicians not always being addressed by management.
• Structural racism and persistent inequalities for women from black and Asian backgrounds and women from more deprived areas resulting in a “notably higher risk of adverse outcomes”, as well as discrimination against disabled women, Muslim families, refugee and asylum women and LGBT families.
• A lack of compassion and transparency in the event of baby loss and harm, causing mothers to wrongly blame themselves, compounding trauma and impeding opportunities to learn from mistakes
• Care being delivered in outdated and dilapidated buildings, in some cases compromising clinical care. In some settings, bereavement spaces were insufficient or non-existent.
• Worryingly, staff themselves reporting that their own maternity units did not have sufficient numbers of personnel to deliver safe care.

After the Francis report into the widespread failings at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust back in 2013, many NHS trusts promised to prioritise patient safety, embrace the values of transparency and accountability and learn from their mistakes, to ensure they were never again repeated.

But since that time, there has been scandal after scandal.

The accounts to which Baroness Amos refers are heartbreaking. More must surely now be done to learn from the traumatic and life-changing experiences of the brave families involved with a view to finally improving maternity care and patient safety.

It is, of course, positive that this urgently needed maternity review is now well underway and that families are finally being listened to. However, they may be dismayed to hear that the maternity taskforce has yet to be set up, the vital role of which will be to ensure the recommendations made by Baroness Amos in her final report, due this spring, are implemented in maternity units nationally. Establishing this maternity task force is now mission critical so that finally, valuable lessons can be learned from past mistakes and constructive steps taken to meaningfully improve maternity care and to protect women and babies from avoidable harm.

At BBK we have long been campaigning for improved maternity care and are working with our clients to produce our response to the call for evidence. We would encourage anyone with experience of NHS Maternity or Neonatal care to do the same Call for Evidence – National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation.