45 newborn babies died needlessly in ANOTHER hospital maternity scandal
We must break cycle of deplorable care, says excoriating report
DEVASTATED families were left asking ‘how many more babies must die’ following the latest ‘catastrophic’ maternity scandal to shame our health service.
A damning report yesterday exposed the outrage that at least 45 babies died unnecessarily due to ‘deeprooted’ failures in care at East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust.
In total, 97 babies and mothers came to significant harm over 11 years due to ‘deplorable’ care by maternity staff.
Investigators had no doubt the numbers were ‘minimum estimates’ and said a lack of meaningful action meant it is likely similar incidents are happening elsewhere.
Dr Bill Kirkup, who led the investigation, warned that such incidents can no longer be seen as a ‘one-off’ and called for a new national system to ‘break the cycle’ of maternity scandals.
He called for a ‘public service accountability law’ to be introduced so organisations can be prosecuted if they stage cover-ups in future tragedies.
Last night, grieving parents said this had to be the last maternity scandal to hit the NHS, while asking why there had not been more of an outcry about ‘two full classa
‘I will never be able to forgive’
rooms’ of children who never came home. Dr Kelli Rudolph, who lost daughter Celandine when she was five days old in 2016, said this has to be ‘the end point’.
She said: ‘If in this period of time, a serial killer had killed 45 babies it would be in the headlines from here until the ends of the earth.
‘But 45 babies are dead. It’s one thing to read that, but to sit there and [hear they were] avoidable deaths. What does 45 children look like in a classroom in a school? It’s two full classrooms.’
Danielle Clark suffered a traumatic birth with her son Noah – now nine – and felt her concerns were dismissed because she was first-time mother. She said: ‘People need to be held accountable. Things have got to change. Babies are dying just through bad care and pure neglect.’
And Bex Walton, whose son Tommy died in 2020, two days after being born at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, said: ‘Sorry is not good enough. ‘I will never be able to forgive.’ The harrowing 182-page report was severely critical of the staff who presided over the poor care at the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital (QEQM) in Margate and the William Harvey Hospital between 2009 to 2020.
It described a ‘culture of tribalism’, which included midwives who were ‘bullying and dismissive’ towards mothers.
One woman whose baby had died was told by a member of staff:
‘It’s God’s will; God only takes the babies that he wants to take.’
Another, named only as C, was left bleeding after a traumatic delivery with her family told staff ‘are all in the staffroom having a cup of tea to recover’. The woman’s baby died the following day.
The report described how maternity services suffered as consultants ‘expected junior staff and locum doctors to manage clinical problems themselves, discouraged escalation, and on occasion refused to attend out of hours’.
It recorded 97 incidents where mothers or babies either died or suffered injuries or disabilities as a result of poor treatment.
These included 45 cases where babies died – 12 of brain damage – and 23 incidents of mothers dying or suffering injuries.
In a letter to Health Secretary Therese Coffey and NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard, Dr Kirkup said the report must be a catalyst for tackling ‘embedded, deep-rooted problems’.
He wrote: ‘It is too late to pretend that this is just another oneoff, isolated failure, a freak event that will ‘never happen again’.
‘Since the report of the Morecambe Bay investigation in 2015, maternity services have been the subject of more significant policy initiatives than any other service.
‘Yet, since then, there have been major service failures in Shrewsbury and Telford, in East Kent, and (it seems) in Nottingham. If we do not begin to tackle this differently, there will be more.’
In April, Donna Ockenden, who led a report into the worst maternity scandal – in which 201 babies and nine mothers died at Shrewsbury and Telford hospitals – called for sweeping reforms.
Now Dr Kirkup, an obstetrician, said it should be a criminal offence for NHS staff and public sector workers to lie to members of the public and urged a ‘maternity signalling system’ to be set up within months to monitor data and flag abnormally high rates of baby deaths at NHS trusts.
Miss Coffey had been expected to respond to the report in Parliament but remained silent.
Health minister Caroline Johnson apologised to families and said the NHS was ‘committed to preventing families from going through the same pain in future’.
The National Childbirth Trust said: ‘The devastating truth is that this report is not a one-off.
Birte Harlev-Lam, of the Royal College of Midwives, said: ‘We cannot have review after review, report after report, and nothing fundamentally changes.’
Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent, chief midwifery officer at NHS England, said: ‘It is clear that there have been severe failings in the care they received, when they should have been protected and cared for by our services.’
BACK in 2015, Dr Bill Kirkup chaired an inquiry into the maternity scandal at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay.
His excoriating report blamed a culture of incompetence, collusion and cover-up by managers and clinical staff for the avoidable deaths of mothers and babies.
But since that warning to the NHS, has anything really changed? It appears not.
Seven years on, it is both shameful and depressing that Dr Kirkup has exposed another catalogue of horrors in maternity care, this time at East Kent Hospitals Trust.
Between 2009 and 2020, up to 45 newborns died needlessly and dozens of mothers and babies suffered brain damage or other lifelong disabilities as a result of neglect, deplorable treatment and, in some cases, an astonishing level of cruelty.
What about the woman who, mid-birth, could feel being cut open due to inadequate pain relief? Or the grieving mother told by a staff member that her child’s death was ‘God’s will’? These incidents sound like something from the Dark Ages.
To make matters worse, instead of taking responsibility for their mistakes and learning from them, managers and midwives’ first instinct was deception and denial.
Desperate to be seen as the party of the NHS, the Tories have shunned major reform, instead pouring ever more money into it.
But the Kirkup report shows this is not about funding but the way trusts are run.
These scandals can no longer be seen as isolated failures. New national measures are needed to break the cycle.
If any good can come from this tragedy, it must be a change in attitudes to childbirth.