Maternity ward blunders are as common as they were 20 years ago

‘Very little has changed’

MATERNITY wards have done ‘very little’ to prevent serious medical errors in the past 20 years, a damning report warns.

Babies are today just as likely to suffer brain damage as a result of blunders made by midwives and doctors as they were during the late 90s.

Midwives are failing to properly monitor heartbeats and junior doctors are attempting to perform complex deliveries with no previous experience.

The report by NHS Resolution – the health service’s legal body – examined 50 cases where the health service admitted liability for babies being born with cerebral palsy, a form of brain damage, between 2012 and 2016.

The errors occurred at 40 hospitals and are expected to cost the NHS £390million in compensation and care. The authors said that two-thirds of errors (64 per cent) occurred when midwives failed to monitor the foetus’s heart rate properly during labour.

Midwives were also criticised for having a ‘wait-and-see approach’ and for not intervening quickly when the delivery was going seriously wrong.

The findings of the report come amid concerns that midwives’ obsession with natural births has had devastating consequences.

Only last month the Royal College of Midwives said it was considering dropping advice they have given for the previous 12 years for women to have babies with limited medical intervention.

The hardline agenda has been partly blamed for scandals at two maternity units, Shrewsbury and Telford in Shropshire and University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay in Cumbria. Almost 30 babies are feared to have died at these units combined over a ten-year period due to avoidable mistakes by staff. The report examined cases where mistakes had led to babies being born with cerebral palsy, a lifelong condition which affects movement and development, when they could have been healthy had midwives or doctors acted quicker and performed caesareans or other interventions.

In one case a baby’s heart rate had been abnormal for three and a half hours but midwives failed to spot anything was wrong.

On a separate occasion, an infant suffered brain damage because a junior doctor had not completed resuscitation training.

In 26 of the 50 cases examined, the report’s authors highlighted poor communication among midwives and doctors.

In eight, they noted midwives had been too slow to act or had adopted a ‘wait-and-see approach’.

The report concluded that in terms of preventing these errors, ‘very little, if anything, has changed over the last 20 to 25 years’.

Dr Michael Magro, the lead author, said: ‘These incidents are very rare. However, every case presents an opportunity for learning in order to improve the safety of maternity care.’

Professor Zarko Alfirevic of Liverpool University, who is undertaking a major review on avoidable errors for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said: ‘The emotional cost to each family is incalculable and we owe it to them to properly investigate what happened.’

The report stressed that, overall, England is still one of the safest places in the world to give birth. There are approximately 660,000 births in the country each year and approximately 1,800 new cases of cerebral palsy, although many are unavoidable.

An NHS England spokesman said: ‘We welcome this report, which recognises that the NHS is one of the safest healthcare systems in the world.

‘New action... will help avoid the rare but potentially devastating consequences for children and families when things go wrong.’