EXPOSED: BRITAIN'S NEXT MATERNITY SCANDAL BY @hannahsbee When a woman enters a hospital maternity ward, she places her life – and that of her baby – in the hands of medical staff. But in Britain today, that trust is being broken. Nearly half of England’s maternity units require improvement or are rated inadequate. The failure is endemic and systemic – “a national scandal”, according to the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting. For four months, we – together with @Channel4News – have been investigating maternity care at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (OUH), speaking with 24 women whose care spans from 2009 to this summer. We have heard harrowing accounts of stillbirths and neonatal deaths; met mothers whose children have been left with brain damage and who have themselves sustained lifelong injuries and mental trauma. All of this has been compounded by the institution’s defensiveness in the face of criticism, and its extraordinary reaction when those most affected have chosen to speak out. Before publication we provided details of our findings to the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, and we can reveal that he has since asked NHS England to examine specific allegations of failings outside the scope of Valerie Amos’s national investigation into maternity care. But this story is far broader than maternity-service failures. Streeting said the revelations were “scandalous” and pointed to a “moral failure” in the system overall. He continued: “I’m concerned about the extent to which we’ve got a… cultural problem across the NHS, where protecting the reputation of the NHS – and of trusts, sparing the blushes of executive leaders and clinicians – is prioritised over and above doing the right thing by patients.” That is a problem no inquiry, however big, can solve.
