The NHS is systematically failing mothers and babies

Here we go again. Yet another inquiry into failing maternity care in 21st-century Britain has delivered a damning report. Donna Ockenden’s review of the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust – the largest of its kind in the history of the NHS – tells a depressingly familiar story.

Once again, we learn how hundreds of mothers and babies were left to die or suffer catastrophic, life-altering injuries due to the actions of a healthcare provider. Ockenden found that more than 500 mothers and babies were harmed or died as a result of their treatment in Nottingham hospitals, in particular the Queen’s Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital. The report describes an utterly dysfunctional workplace culture where women’s concerns were routinely dismissed, staff were bullied into silence, and so-called ‘natural birth’ was pursued dogmatically.

We have seen this all before. We saw it in Morecambe, we saw it in Shrewsbury and Telford, and we are seeing it now in Nottingham. Each time, it’s the same: an inquiry issues damning conclusions, hands are publicly wrung and a string of bureaucratic recommendations are issued. The public is told that lessons will be learned. Yet nothing changes. It is now plainly obvious that tweaks here and there are not going to work. Why do we keep trying to fix a machine that is so fundamentally broken?

We are living in the 21st century, in one of the richest nations on earth, with major advances in science and technology happening all the time. Yet the standard of our maternity care has gone backwards. The standard fixes will no longer suffice. The rot inside NHS maternity care is deep within its basic structures.

It is clear that funding plays a major role in how short-staffed and threadbare the service is. I have given birth three times, and each time staffing levels were a problem. Women were left screaming in agony, waiting for pain relief that didn’t always come on time, because there was only one anaesthetist on duty to care for dozens of women in labour. I was told once by a retired doctor that maternity care, like psychiatry, is treated like a Cinderella service by the NHS. If that is the case, then perhaps it is time for a total system overhaul, where another funding model is considered? In many other countries, maternity care is funded by health insurance. That may be a viable and pragmatic solution for Britain. No matter how much the irrational left screeches about ‘selling off’ the NHS.

There is also something else going on, psychologically, that is harder to define and people can’t always explain easily. The Ockenden report reveals once again how Women’s fears and concerns were often dismissed or ignored by medical staff. People have told the inquiry that they felt they were treated cruelly. If they asked for help they were treated as an inconvenience or told to wait until it was too late.

I have written before about how I was berated by a nasty and incompetent nurse, whose help I had asked for as I lay paralysed post-partum (after a spinal block). I honestly thought that it was just my bad luck to meet someone like that, but I was shocked to later discover that the former Conservative MP, Theo Clarke, had an alarmingly similar experience. She too lay paralysed after a traumatic birth and had called for help from a nurse who poked her head round the door to say, ‘Not my baby, not my problem’. Some of this behaviour can be explained by staffing levels. People do suffer compassion fatigue when they are working on crowded and understaffed maternity wards. But it is still unacceptable and shows that poor standards in care have become normalised. Patients in need are treated like the problem.

Shamefully, Ockenden said that numerous people employed by the trust refused to take part in her inquiry. It seems that some refuse to recognise that they even have a problem.

But they – and the NHS in general – really do have a problem. British families are expected to just be grateful for whatever substandard care is doled out to them by the bureaucrats of the NHS. The NHS has been treated like a sacred cow for far too long. We should not accept this lousy status quo. We don’t need another inquiry or a set of new guidelines. We need a total system reboot – the lives of mothers and children depend on it.

Candice Holdsworth is a writer. Visit her website here.