Maternity deaths: black mark for the NHS
There has been a distinct lack of interest, during this election, in a “genuine scandal”, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. An interim report detailing failings in maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust was leaked last week. It revealed that, thanks to a “toxic” culture prevailing at the trust for decades, more than 40 babies and three mothers had died unnecessarily. Another 50 babies had been brain-damaged (and hundreds of other cases are under review). Families seeking the truth about their children’s deaths had been treated with a “distinct lack of kindness and respect”, wrote the report’s author, the maternity expert Donna Ockenden. The news was a reminder that though we are all meant to love the NHS, it is sometimes dangerously dysfunctional. A recent study by the Nuffield Trust found that the NHS had among the highest death rates for newborns in a survey of 19 developed nations.
The pattern is “chillingly familiar” from a series of other scandals, said The Independent – “a roll call of shame” that includes Mid-Staffordshire, Gosport War Memorial Hospital, Morecambe
Bay and the Bristol children’s heart scandal. In every case, NHS managers responded to complaints “by dismissing failings, if they were admitted at all, as one-offs”. Promises to learn lessons were “insincere”, and investigations too frequently sought to protect those who made mistakes. Trust in the NHS – and even its survival – will be endangered “if it cannot change its culture of patient safety”.
It seems, in this case, that the Shrewsbury and Telford Trust had an “overzealous appetite” for natural birth, said Shaun Lintern in the same paper. That was the issue at Morecambe Bay maternity unit, where midwives pursued “normal” births at “any cost”, according to a 2015 report; Shrewsbury and Telford has had one of the country’s lowest rates of delivery by caesarean over the past decade. The natural childbirth movement was meant to help women, said Catherine Bennett in The Observer – to free them from “unnecessary” medical interventions traditionally made by male doctors. How bitterly ironic that it appears to have morphed into an “ideology” that, on occasion, actually endangers their lives.