Wes Streeting (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Bereaved mothers met Health Secretary Wes Streeting, demanding accountability from an NHS trust after maternity failures led to the deaths of their babies.
In an attempt to convince Mr. Streeting to hold a public inquiry into problems with the trust’s maternity care, the group of parents who gave birth at Leeds Teaching Hospitals (LTH) NHS Trust met with him.
A nationwide review into “failures” in NHS maternity and neonatal services will look at 14 hospital trusts, including LTH.
A public inquiry is presently “the only way for families from any kind of scandal to receive accountability and justice,” according to the Leeds Hospitals Maternity Family Support Group, which also stated that the fast review would not “go deep enough or get to the wider issues.”
At a press conference in Leeds on Wednesday, some of the mothers said Mr Streeting had been “moved, shocked, horrified and appalled” by their stories, and had agreed to another meeting with them.
Lauren Caulfield, whose daughter Grace died in the days before her birth in 2022, said:
“Following today’s meeting and the sheer courage and bravery of the many families who were able to attend, and those who wrote in statements to be read, he is going away to seriously reflect on his decision, (not to hold a public inquiry) following the understanding that the problems in Leeds are way beyond what a national maternity investigation will be able to achieve.”
Fiona Winser-Ramm, whose daughter Aliona died in 2020 after what an inquest found to be a number of failures, said:
“There’s been significant movement in the case that he was clearly moved, shocked, horrified and appalled, I think, by the things that he was hearing.
We had families spanning from 2011 up until now and it was horrifying to see account after account of such similar experiences, such similar failings in care, the same attitude of management throughout that.”
Attending the conference was also senior midwife Donna Ockenden, who is presently investigating the deaths or injuries of hundreds of babies in the care of Nottingham University Hospitals Trust after reviewing mother and baby deaths at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust.
When the group displayed images of their infants, Ms. Ockenden was “very upset,” according to Angela Welsh, whose son passed away in 2011.
She said:
“Even Wes himself showed a lot of emotion. He was listening. He did show a lot. And I do think that he will do the right thing.”
The group, according to Ms. Winser-Ramm, displayed a 10-meter-long laundry line in front of Mr. Streeting, with 56 babygrows and two adult-sized t-shirts, to symbolize the maternal and infant deaths at LTH that could have been prevented between 2019 and 2024, according to a BBC investigation.
She said:
“It is a horrific sight to see. It stretched the full length of the room and I don’t think anybody could look at that and not be moved, not be horrified.
More often that not we become statistics, we become numbers, we become just a piece of paper, and we wanted to portray to the Health Secretary that we are people, that our children are people, that they that they mattered then, they matter now.
I actually said if I was holding up a washing line with 56 school uniforms on it we wouldn’t even be having to have a debate about this. You would have already taken action.”
Ms Welsh said:
“We’ve lost our babies, we don’t want them to die in vain. We want to change something.”
Amarjit Matharoo, whose daughter was stillborn in 2024, said a public inquiry would “drive change on the ground”, adding:
“At the moment, we see little reviews being done, for each one of our children, but then nothing coming out of it, so no actual change.”
Ms Winser-Ramm said she started the support group “in the depths of despair” after her daughter died.
She said:
“Having been explicitly told by the hospital that they had never seen anything like it before, which is just a lie, that we were a one-off that they’d never seen anything like it before.
I felt so lonely, so isolated and the desperation that I was in, I needed to find people that were the same as me, that understood what it felt like to be living this life that we had been forced to live.
So, I actively started to try and find people frantically searching online, and I started to come across newspaper articles, other families that were the original whistleblowers around this, around the 2011 kind of mark, and started to connect with those families and they helped save my life, basically, those families, because they were the first people that made me feel like I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t making this out to be a bigger thing than it was.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said:
“Too many families have endured profound harm and heartbreaking loss due to failings in maternity care, and that’s why we’ve commissioned an urgent national investigation and set up a taskforce to root out those systemic failures.
But we know we also need action now to improve safety across NHS maternity and neonatal care, so we’ve introduced advanced monitoring systems, new care bundles to tackle maternal deaths and programmes to prevent brain injuries during childbirth.”
What reforms are being implemented to improve maternity safety in NHS trusts?
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has asked for a rapid and national investigation into systemic failures that extend to 15 years of investigation to focus on investigating up to 10 of the worst performing maternity and neonatal services, such as Sussex, with a primary focus on these 10 services. It will subsequently consider all aspects of maternity care across the system, culminating in requesting clarity of national action.
A National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce has been set up, chaired by the Health Secretary, made up of Trusts, clinical leaders and bereaved families, that will oversee the improvement and ensure the voices of victims’ families are central to the reforms.
The investigation is anticipated to hold failing trusts accountable for promoting improvement promptly, while also improving the culture of leadership and safety.