ARROGANT BOSSES MUST FACE JUSTICE
UNTRUE.’ ‘ Irresponsible.’ ‘ Scaremongering.’ With those damning words, then chief executive Simon Wright of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals Trust blithely dismissed an explosive Daily Mail front page from August 2018: The first exposé of the extent of its emerging maternity scandal.
We revealed how the NHS Trust was feared to be one of the most toxic in the country – where babies and mothers had allegedly died because midwives had failed to intervene.
At the time, the trust was investigating 63 serious incidents in its maternity unit, a trebling since then health secretary Jeremy Hunt ordered a review in April 2017.
In itself, that was a tragic figure. Yet it soared to more than 1,250 cases as hundreds more families came forward, some alleging poor care dating from the 1970s.
Telford Hospitals’ response to our report? An aggressive press release claiming our account was ‘inaccurate’, insisting there were ‘no signs of failure of care’ in any of the cases reviewed so far.
‘To suggest that there are more cases which have not been revealed when this is simply untrue is irresponsible and scaremongering,’ he added.
‘This will cause unnecessary anxiety amongst women going through one of the most important times of their life and I would like to assure them that our maternity services are a safe environment with dedicated caring staff.’
Yesterday’s announcement by West Mercia Police that they will be launching a criminal investigation into the trust is a devastating vindication of the Mail’s initial story.
Geoff Wessell, the Assistant Chief Constable of West Mercia Police, said the investigation will examine whether there is enough evidence to support a criminal case against the trust as a whole or any staff, including midwives or senior managers. Yet even before ACC Wessel’s intervention Mr Wright had paid the price for his management, forced to resign in June last year – although claiming bizarrely he had ‘loved’ his time at the trust.
The trust’s director of nursing and midwifery, Deidre Fowler, had abruptly left her post four months earlier to work in another hospital in Bedford.
In the nearly two years since our story was published, the hospital’s maternity services has been put into special measures by the Care Quality Commission and rated ‘inadequate.’
CURRENTLY the trust is the subject of an independent review led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden which is examining all cases of maternity services.
Last November a leaked interim report of this review warned of a catalogue of failings by doctors and midwives which continued for more than 40 years.
But the scandal would never have come to light were it not for the tireless campaigning of bereaved families, notably Richard Stanton and Rhiannon Davies who lost their baby Kate in March 2009.
In fact Rhiannon Davies and another grieving mother, Kayleigh Griffiths, whose baby Pippa died in 2016, wrote to Mr Hunt in 2016 about what they believed to be a cluster of baby deaths.
The subsequent investigation blew apart the trust’s best efforts to cover it all up, and its insistence that it was providing safe care. As it now faces the full glare of a criminal investigation, the families left shattered by the scandal can at last hold out hope for justice.