Full inquiry into maternity care may be needed, says Wes Streeting
The health secretary has indicated that a full public inquiry may be required into maternity care across England, after poor care at several hospitals including those in Leeds has sparked widespread reviews.
Wes Streeting said he was “genuinely open minded” about whether to launch an inquiry but said the urgency of the situation meant he could not delay action.
It comes after Mr Streeting u-turned on launching an inquiry into maternity failings in Leeds, following a protracted campaign from grieving families who lost babies in the city’s two maternity units.
A launch date for the Leeds inquiry has yet to be set, but a separate review into maternity and neonatal care in England led by Baroness Valerie Amos is due to report in the spring and Mr Streeting acknowledged the problems were “widespread and endemic”.
Mr Streeting acknowledged that some of the families who have suffered poor care had called for justice, accountability and a full public inquiry.
“I’m keeping open the option of a public inquiry,” he said, but added: “A public inquiry takes years. I don’t think we’ve got time to wait to crack on with maternity improvements.”
He added: “One of the things we’ve struggled with as a government across the board – there are plenty of examples of this in the NHS, but more broadly – is when you don’t have a statutory public inquiry, how do you deliver real accountability and justice?
“And the challenge is, if the public inquiry is the only route, then we end up costing millions of pounds, putting families through what, in itself, is an ordeal.
“So we’re trying to find a way as a government to see how you make sure the state is honest with people, levels with people, admits fault and liability with people, without kind of going to what I think is the default culture of ‘when something goes wrong, how do we avoid liability’.”
In an interim report, Baroness Valerie Amos’s review showed that the NHS has recorded 748 recommendations relating to maternity and neonatal care in the past decade.
Mr Streeting told BBC Radio 4’s Today the NHS was “almost drowning in recommendations” but “can’t see the wood for the trees”.
He said: “It’s hard to put into words just how widespread and endemic the challenges in maternity services are.
“I think what we don’t have is both a clear diagnostic of where maternity services are today and a clear prescription with clear priorities as to how we put it right, that’s what I’ve asked Valerie Amos to do.”
Lady Amos has warned NHS maternity units are delivering “unacceptable care”, with some women left to “bleed out” in bathrooms and babies suffering avoidable deaths.
The Labour peer, who is leading the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation, has spoken to more than 170 families across England, including those whose babies have died because of failings in care.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust was originally part of the Amos review, but after the decision was taken to give the Trust its own inquiry, it was removed from the list of hospitals.
The Leeds’ inquiry announcement came after an investigation found dozens of babies and at least two mothers had died at the Trust due to potential failings in its care.
Its maternity services have since been downgraded by inspectors to ‘inadequate’ - the lowest possible rating.
Last month, data showed one in five women do not feel they are taken seriously if they raise a concern during labour.
Data from a large survey of 16,750 women found improvements in many areas when it comes to NHS maternity care, but key issues remain.
These include one in 10 women being left alone at a time when it worried them either during the later stages of labour or during birth – unchanged from 2021.