{"id":665225,"date":"2026-06-30T00:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T00:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/665225\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T00:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T00:51:09","slug":"we-cant-continue-like-this-inquiry-demands-nhs-maternity-overhaul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/665225\/","title":{"rendered":"‘We can’t continue like this’: Inquiry demands NHS maternity overhaul"},"content":{"rendered":"

The National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation, external<\/a> was set up last summer by the then-health secretary, Wes Streeting.<\/p>\n

The aim to was produce a report to drive through improvements across England after a series of maternity scandals undermined the trust of many families in the NHS.<\/p>\n

Baroness Amos and her team heard from more than 450 families and visited 12 NHS trusts to understand what change was needed.<\/p>\n

The key failing they identified was an unwillingness to listen to women and families, leading to poor outcomes. There was a lack of a consistent standard of care, with large variations across the health service.<\/p>\n

The system is “fragmented, overly complex and too slow to learn and improve,” Baroness Amos noted in her report.<\/p>\n

One of the immediate actions being urged on maternity units is to overhaul their triage service, which Baroness Amos described as “increasingly becoming the A&E service for maternity”.<\/p>\n

As part of that, midwives should be dedicated to answering calls and providing timely advice, while women should be offered a face-to-face appointment if they remain concerned. If these changes are made, the report says, “lives will be saved and harm reduced”.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, racism and discrimination must be treated as a critical safety issue, the inquiry found, requiring urgent intervention including gathering granular data on unequal outcomes that is escalated to board level when patterns emerge.<\/p>\n

Baroness Amos acknowledged calls for a statutory public inquiry that would compel senior figures at under-fire hospital trusts to give evidence. But she is not supportive of such a move.<\/p>\n

“Statutory public inquiries take a very, very long time,” she told the BBC.<\/p>\n

“From the work that I have done and from the conversations that I have had with families, I don’t at the moment see that there is a need for a statutory public inquiry, but that’s not a decision for me to take.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation, external was set up last summer by the then-health secretary, Wes Streeting.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-665225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}