The horror of the latest NHS maternity scandal

What’s the worst thing about Thursday’s Ockenden Review into the latest NHS maternity scandal, at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital? Is it the scale of the trauma, the deaths and the lack of compassion which put together make for the worst maternity scandal that the health service has ever seen? The inquiry started with 250 cases, but widened that to a horrifying 1,862 cases where care may have been inadequate. These are just the interim findings as the investigation continues and will publish a final report in 2021.

Perhaps it’s the details that are the worst thing about the document. The review found 13 maternal deaths in 18 years, stillbirths which could have been avoided and deaths of babies due to repeated attempts at forceps deliveries and a refusal to perform caesarean sections which then led to severe trauma for the baby or the baby’s death. On those last incidents, the report observes that women were made well aware that their requests for a C-section were being refused because the Trust wanted to keep its rates of these operations as low as possible:

‘The review team observed that women who accessed the Trust’s maternity service appeared to have little or no freedom to express a preference for Caesarean section or exercise any choice on their mode of delivery.