Midwives’ chief now in charge of ward safety
A SENIOR midwife criticised for her part in the scandal was given a new job in charge of improving performance.
Cathy Smith was head of midwifery at Shrewsbury and Telford for nine years, from 2006 to 2015.
She was heavily criticised in a review into the death of baby Kate Stanton-Davies – for having a ‘defensive attitude’ and being unwilling to learn from mistakes.
But in 2015 – the same year the review was published – she was moved to a role charged with improving the hospital’s performance. She was appointed to be Kaizen Promotion Office Lead, ‘kaizen’ is Japanese for continuous learning.
The role involves liaising with a leading US hospital, the Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, which
‘Defensive attitude’
has a world-class reputation for patient safety.
A spokesman for the trust insisted her job did not specifically involve patient safety but was more about transforming and improving the trust.
But in a ‘first person piece’ – published on the trust’s website – she wrote: ‘Our partnership with Virginia Mason will help us to become one of the safest hospitals in the country.’
Her salary has never been published but as a head of midwifery she was likely to have been earn- ing in excess of £50,000 a year. The review which criticised Mrs Smith called into question her ‘professional judgment’.
It added: ‘It can be argued that the head of midwifery’s apparent reluctance to accept that there remained uninvestigated midwifery practice issues in this case suggest a defensive attitude which prevented the lessons required to be learnt from this case from being learned.’
In September 2015 she flew out to Virginia Mason on behalf of the hospital to learn from its techniques.
At the time she said: ‘I have received incredible support both from colleagues in my care group and from colleagues.’