A new report by the Maternity Safety Support Programme has revealed “significant” concerns about the safety and quality of maternity services at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
The damning report from NHS England comes just a month after the Trust’s maternity services at two hospitals were downgraded to “inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
Significant concerns
NHS England published its findings after visiting the Trust in March of this year.
This followed a report by the BBC in which 67 families said they had experienced inadequate care at the Trust, including parents who said their babies had suffered avoidable injury or death.
Two months later, NHS England placed the Trust under its national Maternity Safety Support Programme, which works to improve services where serious concerns have been identified.
Maternity safety support programme
NHS England’s Maternity Safety Support Programme (MSSP) is a national support programme that looks to provide recommendations and guidance to trusts.
The MSSP team visited LTH in March of this year and prepared their report following the visit.
The report made 101 recommendations to improve the quality of care and ensure the wellbeing of mothers and babies.
Areas of concern highlighted in the report included:
- Issues with the escalation process, particularly out of hours, with no clinical or midwifery management on call.
- Safety concerns being de-escalated without resolution, and learning from incidents was not robust, meaning that was a continuation of previously identified issues and themes.
- Challenge in responding to families who had experienced harm and poor outcomes.
- Lack of CTG machines to enable women to be safely and effectively monitored.
- Poor communication and staffing issues with maternity leadership needing improvement.
Lack of improvement
The BBC reports that an NHS whistleblower told them there were “still huge concerns about the lack of progress” on some of the recommendations in the report from NHS England.
This is because some of the points had already been identified back in January during a Rapid Quality Review Meeting, which is held by the NHS to profile risk and make action plans.
But the whistleblower reported that several concerns had not been rectified at all since January.
Shocking and horrifying reading
A group of bereaved families from Leeds said that the report from NHS England was “truly shocking and horrifying reading”.
A spokesperson for the group said:
“As bereaved and harmed families this most recent report, yet again, totally vindicates what we have been saying for years. The culture of denial, the failure to listen, and the absence of real accountability are systemic and persistent.”
Calls for an independent inquiry
Dozens of families are now calling for an independent inquiry into the maternity services to ensure accountability for the deaths or injuries of their babies.
Chief Nurse at LTH, Rabina Tindale, said:
“This report has highlighted significant areas where we need to improve our maternity services, and my priority is to make sure we urgently take action to deliver the recommendations.
“I would like to apologise to all the families who have received maternity care with us which has fallen short of the high standard we aim to provide.”
The full MSSP report can be found on the LTH website here.
Comment
Another report into maternity care and another report of shocking and systemic issues with maternity services in the UK.
What is more concerning about this particular report is the clear indication that there has been a failure to learn from past recommendations and make improvements before now. This therefore makes it clear that even more families have been put at significant risk of harm.
This cannot continue.
Mistakes are made and things go wrong within the NHS, but to see that families are not being heard and action is not being taken to review what has happened, why, and to put in place measures that could prevent the same thing happening again is very worrying.
LTH now must take steps to proactively take action on the report from the MSSP to restore any confidence of patients in the maternity services.
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Danielle Young is a Partner in our Medical Negligence team, which has been ranked in tier one by the independently researched publication, The Legal 500. She specialises in pregnancy and birth injury claims (including cerebral palsy), brain injury claims, fatal claims, surgical error claims, and cauda equina injury claims.
If you have any questions in relation to the subjects discussed in this article, then please get in touch with Danielle or another member of the team in Derby, Leicester, or Nottingham on 0800 024 1976 or via our online form.
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