Conservative government was 'asleep at the wheel' in relation to maternity safety, senior midwife says

The previous government was "asleep at the wheel" in relation to maternity safety and oversaw a "number of lost opportunities" to improve care in the sector, a senior midwife has said.

Donna Ockenden listed 15 areas for "immediate and essential action" when she published a report into the maternity failings at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust in March 2022.

She also backed the UK's first ever parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma which found this year that good care for pregnant women "is the exception rather than the rule".

The senior midwife previously said families have been "let down" by failure to improve services.

Ms Ockenden, now the chair of an independent review into maternity services at the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, is calling for a meeting with Health Secretary Wes Streeting as she warns failings in care are putting mothers and babies at risk.

Speaking to Sky News after the hospital's annual general meeting today, Ms Ockenden said: "There have been a number of lost opportunities to improve maternity care... [former Conservative health secretaries] Sajid Javid and Jeremy Hunt gave very generously of their time to me as the chair of that review.

"The government fully endorsed all those findings.

"Sajid Javid said that everything that we'd written in that report would be introduced swiftly.

"We then had multiple changes of secretary of state. The government were quite frankly asleep at the wheel as regards to maternity services, and we're still in a position where we need accelerated progress on those immediate and essential actions."

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Mr Streeting, who became health secretary after Labour won the general election this year, has confirmed he would be happy to meet Ms Ockenden to discuss maternity care.

He told Sky News earlier: "When it comes to the crisis in all maternity services across the country, it is one of the biggest issues that keeps me awake at night worrying about the quality of care being delivered today and the risk of disaster greeting women in labour tomorrow.

"I think that what we've seen in the case of specific trusts are problems and risk factors that exist, right across maternity services across the country.

"And we're keen to make sure that when it comes to the work that Donna Ockenden has already done, we make sure that those lessons are applied not just in the case of those specific trusts, but actually right across the country.

"And we're determined to get this right."

A spokesman for the Conservatives declined to comment, as did Jeremy Hunt, who was Tory health secretary from 2012 to 2018. Sajid Javid, who was health secretary from 2021 to 2022, has been approached for comment.