{"id":757377,"date":"2026-06-24T14:52:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T14:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/757377\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T14:52:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T14:52:10","slug":"more-than-500-mothers-and-babies-died-or-were-harmed-at-toxic-nottingham-nhs-trust-report-finds-nottingham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/757377\/","title":{"rendered":"More than 500 mothers and babies died or were harmed at \u2018toxic\u2019 Nottingham NHS trust, report finds | Nottingham"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than 500 mothers and babies came to harm or died as a result of inadequate care in Nottingham<\/a>, an inquiry into the NHS\u2019s biggest ever maternity scandal has revealed.<\/p>\n

A total of 444 women and 76 newborn babies suffered \u201cpotentially avoidable\u201d outcomes because they received substandard treatment over 13 years from Nottingham University hospitals NHS<\/a> trust (NUH), a damning report led by the childbirth expert Donna Ockenden has found.<\/p>\n

The 401-page document paints a stark and forensic picture of maternity care at its two hospitals \u2013 Queen\u2019s medical centre and Nottingham city hospital \u2013 where \u201cmultiple\u201d women experienced dangerously poor and sometimes \u201ccruel\u201d care, understaffing was routine, lessons from patient safety incidents were not learned and bullying by \u201cintimidating cliques\u201d of staff was rife.<\/p>\n

Ockenden and her team of maternity experts who undertook the three-year inquiry<\/a> investigated the deaths of 27 mothers between 2006 and 2024 and \u201cidentified failures in care that may have or substantially impacted on the outcome in six deaths\u201d.<\/p>\n

Donna Ockenden, senior midwife. Photograph: Peter Flude\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Staff not listening to women or acting promptly on concerns they raised was one of the \u201ccommon failures\u201d involved in maternal deaths, they found, as well as delays in women having scans.<\/p>\n

The review was ordered in 2023 after families warned that maternity care at NUH care was unsafe. It also examined cases in which babies died as a result of being starved of oxygen during birth or picking up a hospital-acquired infection, or because midwives and doctors did not manage the mother\u2019s labour properly or provided poor postnatal care.<\/p>\n

The document paints a stark picture of maternity care at Queen\u2019s medical centre (pictured) and Nottingham city hospital. Photograph: Chris Whiteman\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Thirty-one of the detailed examinations of the deaths of newborn babies found that they had received inadequate care and that, if they had been handled differently, they would probably have avoided coming to harm.<\/p>\n

The report lays bare a host of recurring failings in clinical care that put mothers and babies at risk and in some cases had catastrophic consequences. They included repeated failures to monitor babies properly during labour, misinterpretation of CTG trace-reading of the baby\u2019s health while still in utero, not recognising when babies were in distress, and midwives not escalating worrying cases urgently to doctors to make rapid decisions on the care and treatment needed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a number of cases these failures contributed to severe neonatal injury, stillbirth and neonatal death,\u201d Ockenden\u2019s report says.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hawkins, whose daughter Harriet was stillborn at Nottingham City hospital in April 2016 Photograph: Jacob King\/PA<\/p>\n

About 2,500 families and 850 current or former NUH staff gave evidence to the review team, which examined events from 2012 to 2025. It also found that:<\/p>\n

A \u201cbullying and toxic culture\u201d persisted at NUH over many years and impeded moves to improve care.<\/p>\n

Maternity service managers and the trust\u2019s senior leaders were repeatedly warned about a host of serious problems in the maternity units at both hospitals but did not take effective action.<\/p>\n

Maternity staff displayed \u201ca culture of not admitting women who were seeking admission in labour\u201d, despite the risks this posed to them and their babies.<\/p>\n

Both maternity units were consistently seriously short-staffed and could not cope with the number of births and complexity of cases they had to handle.<\/p>\n

One baby girl who died early in gestation was \u201cinadvertently disposed of as clinical waste by laboratory staff after her postmortem examination\u201d, compounding her parents\u2019 distress.<\/p>\n

Families told Ockenden about horrendous experiences they had. Some were denied pain relief, or given too little. \u201cIt felt brutal \u2026 traumatic \u2026 They were screaming at me: \u2018You need to pull yourself together,\u2019\u201d one woman said.<\/p>\n

In behaviour that Ockenden said was sometimes \u201ccruel\u201d and lacking compassion, staff could be dismissive of women\u2019s concerns. One said she was told: \u201cIs this your first baby? Take some paracetamol and have a hot bath.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

James Murray, the health secretary, responded to the findings by announcing that Martha\u2019s rule<\/a> \u2013 which gives patients the right to an independent second opinion of their care by a separate clinical team \u2013 would be implemented at every maternity unit in England, as suggested by Ockenden.<\/p>\n

In future, current or past NHS staff who refuse to give evidence to maternity inquiries will also have to do so or risk being jailed for up to two years, to try to break the ingrained \u201cculture of silence\u201d that often accompanies care failings and medical negligence.<\/p>\n

Murray vowed that the government and NHS bosses would \u2018deliver lasting change\u2019. Photograph: Thomas Krych\/Zuma Press Wire\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Murray, who is making a Commons statement on the scandal on Wednesday, vowed that the government and NHS bosses would \u201cdeliver lasting change\u201d to improve maternity services across England<\/a>. Ockenden\u2019s findings will help inform an action plan to overhaul childbirth services that the Department of Health and Social Care\u2019s maternity taskforce is drawing up.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a truly harrowing report\u201d, said Kath Abrahams, the chief executive of the pregnancy and baby loss charity Tommy\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is utterly inexcusable that pregnant women seeking help at Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust were in some cases treated so poorly \u2013 sometimes with devastating consequences \u2013 and that healthcare professionals and families who did as much as they could to flag the risks were ignored.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe accounts of racist and unkind behaviour, the apparently deliberate efforts to avoid external scrutiny and the refusal by some senior personnel to answer questions about their role in this scandal are profoundly distressing.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Wednesday\u2019s report is a scathing indictment of poor maternity care over many years at NUH, it follows previous reports into similar failures at three other NHS trusts in England in recent years: Morecambe Bay<\/a>, East Kent<\/a> and Shrewsbury and Telford<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ministers and NHS leaders admit that multiple recommendations from those and other inquiries to improve care have not been implemented and that major problems persist.<\/p>\n

Lady Amos is due to publish the results of her government-commissioned inquiry into maternity and neonatal care next week. It will set out a roadmap for ensuring that childbirth services provide safe and high-quality care to all women and babies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 500 mothers and babies came to harm or died as a result of inadequate care in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":757378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500],"class_list":["post-757377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/757378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}