Newborns and mums ‘in peril from critical lack of training’ in maternity units
BABIES and mothers are at risk of death or disability because of a critical lack of frontline staff training, warns a hard-hitting report.
Midwives, doctors, nurses and paramedics either do not know about official guidelines or are ignoring them when faced with women experiencing a difficult labour.
And the NHS is now facing claims of £1million per day more in medical negligence compensation than is spent on delivering babies as grieving or angry parents take their cases to court.
The NHS is being sued for £2.1billion in connection with maternity-related clinical negligence cases (2017-18 figures), compared with the £1.9billion per year that is spent on delivering babies, according to the maternity charity Baby Lifeline.
Its report – Mind the Gap: An Investigation into the Maternity Training Gap Between NHS Trusts in the UK – uncovered a huge disparity in the amount of money some hospital trusts spend on training clinical staff compared with others.
It found that spending varied widely from £1,051.66 annually at one NHS Trust to £372,878.00 in another.
Judy Ledger, the Founder of Baby Lifeline who lost three babies during pregnancy and childbirth, said: “Time and again the importance of training is highlighted in national reports on neonatal deaths and maternity injuries.
“Mothers and babies are still needlessly dying, or suffering serious injury, because of a lack of relevant training in the NHS.
“The Government simply won’t achieve its target of halving stillbirths, neonatal deaths, and reducing harm by 2025 without mandating staff training, and properly funding it.”
Impact
She added: “Our report shows that the one-off £8.1million in funding the Government gave to Trusts for maternity training in 2017 has had an impact, but it was a drop in the ocean.
“At the very least, the reduction of one negligence case through proper training would be a life and money saved.”
The report notes that most baby deaths and injuries (between 76-79 per cent) investigated by national bodies are avoidable with different care, and that training of frontline staff can have a significant impact in reducing the numbers.
There are around 665,000 babies born in England each year.
But despite falling to its lowest rate in 20 years, there are around 3,000 stillbirths, with one in every 200 babies stillborn.
Guidance on tackling stillbirths, first published in 2016, is known as the Saving Babies Lives’ Care Bundle and advises clinicians to intervene to detect small babies, inform women about reduced foetal movements and improve monitoring during labour.
NHS England said it can prevent more than 600 stillbirths a year, when properly adopted by all Trusts.
But only 7.9 per cent of the UK’s NHS Trusts have adopted the training guidance, says the charity, which is now calling for the guidance to be mandatory across the UK.
Dr William Parry-Smith, a registrar obstetrician and gynaecologist at the West Midlands Deanery and trustee of Baby Lifeline, said: “That the NHS is facing more in claims for obstetric clinical negligence than on delivering babies is nothing short of a national scandal. We’re calling for this to change, and for training to be standardised, mandated and properly funded.
“Fifteen babies are stillborn every day or die in their first 28 days of life, and with proper training this doesn’t have to be the case.
“Baby Lifeline’s report shows that there are still unacceptable variations in training that staff receive and there’s no consistency in Trusts’ spending. The evidence is clear: with whole teams properly trained, the number of stillbirths, neonatal deaths and severe brain injuries can be halved.
“And that’s just the start of what we should be achieving.”
The figures were gathered by Baby Lifeline through a Freedom of Information request sent to all NHS Trusts in the UK in July 2018. CHARITIES are urging the NHS to improve “inconsistent and under-resourced” bereavement care for parents whose new babies die.
Most services lack sufficient specialist staffing and appropriate facilities to support grieving families, according to stillbirth and neonatal death charities Sands and Bliss.
They said improvements are urgently needed because about 40 babies die every week during the neonatal period of up to 28 days.
The care that bereaved families receive before, during and afterwards can have a critical impact on their wellbeing for years, the charities say.
Support
Their Audit of Bereavement Care Provision in UK Neonatal Units report found that despite instances of good practice by individual nurses and doctors, many services are not set up to deliver consistent highquality bereavement care.
Health professionals are also not getting the training and support they need.
The report recommends steps that all NHS Trusts and Boards can take to improve.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show a rise in infant mortality caused by an increase in deaths during the first month.
The Government’s target is to reduce deaths of newborns by 20 per cent next year.
Key findings of the audit