A major inquiry into maternity care at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS trust has found that more than 500 mothers and babies suffered potentially avoidable harm or death over a 13-year period. The review, led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, examined more than 400 cases and identified repeated failures in care at Queen's Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital.
The report describes a bullying and toxic culture, chronic understaffing, and a dismissive attitude towards women's concerns. It investigated the deaths of 27 mothers, concluding that failures in care may have substantially impacted the outcome in six of those deaths. In addition, 31 newborns died after receiving inadequate care that could potentially have been avoided.
Common problems included poor monitoring of babies during labour, misinterpretation of CTG traces, delays in scans, and midwives failing to escalate urgent cases to doctors. Staff sometimes displayed a “culture of not admitting women seeking admission in labour”, and some women were denied pain relief or told to take paracetamol and have a hot bath.
The inquiry heard evidence from around 2,500 families and 850 current or former staff. In one case, a baby girl who died early in gestation was inadvertently disposed of as clinical waste after a postmortem examination, compounding the parents' distress.
The Nottingham Maternity Families group, representing around 600 affected families, renewed its call for a statutory public inquiry into maternity failures across England. Health Secretary James Murray said he would not take the possibility of such an inquiry off the table, but stressed the immediate focus was on implementing the report's recommendations.
