Maternity care failings 'much worse' than anticipated, says head of national review

Hungry mothers, dirty wards and poor care are blighting England's maternity services while staff receive death threats for working in some units, according to a new report.

Baroness Amos, who is chairing a review into maternity care, said that what she has seen so far "has been much worse" than she'd anticipated.

Some women had felt blamed for their baby's death, while others suffered from a lack of empathy, care or apology when things had gone wrong, with poor and black mothers often at the end of discriminatory services.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who set up the review, said "the systemic failures causing preventable tragedies cannot be ignored".

Following visits to seven NHS trusts as well as meeting over 170 families, Baroness Amos said she had consistently come across:

The review has also engaged with staff in maternity services. Some reported having rotten fruit thrown at them, while others said they faced death threats after negative publicity or were attacked on social media.

Adverse media attention could make delivering high quality care more difficult, they said, although it had also acted as catalyst for improvements.

Baroness Amos's inquiry is controversial. Some families believe that limitations on what it can do, and the short time is has to do it, will mean that meaningful action cannot follow.

Emily Barley of the Maternity Safety Alliance, which wants to see a statutory public inquiry into maternity failings, said the initial reflections had "prioritised" staff feelings while minimising the "avoidable harm taking place in NHS maternity services every day".

"This is entirely the wrong process to fix the deep seated and long standing failings in maternity care and we do not understand why [Wes Streeting] is allowing this farce to continue."

Tom Hender, whose son Aubrey was stillborn in 2022, believes a full public inquiry is the "only credible option".

"The review is already finding more than the chair expected," he said. "That should be the clearest sign that the scope isn't suitable and that the issues are bigger than the timescale can handle."

Streeting will chair a new National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce in the New Year which will be responsible for implementing Baroness Amos's recommendations. He promised that families who've suffered poor care "will remain at the heart" of what follows the review.

James Titcombe, a long standing maternity safety campaigner since he lost his son Joshua in 2008, said that while the issues identified by Baroness Amos "mirror long-standing problems we've known about for years," he was supportive of its work as representing "the best opportunity in a generation to finally put maternity services on a safer path."

Rhiannon Davies, who lost her daughter Kate in 2009 and was instrumental in setting up the inquiry into Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, said she believes Baroness Amos "is listening, and we must ensure her work leads to real, urgent change when she publishes her findings next year".

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