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NHS trusts 'actively concealing' mistakes made in maternity wards, leading doctor tells MPs

Pregnant woman -  JGI/Jamie Grill
Pregnant woman - JGI/Jamie Grill

NHS trusts are “actively concealing” mistakes made in maternity wards, a leading doctor has told MPs, as they are warned that care quality is not improving fast enough.

New data shows that 38 per cent of maternity units “require improvement” in terms of safety, according to the Care Quality Commission and one in 100 is “inadequate”.

Dr Bill Kirkup, who led the review into the maternity scandal at Morecambe Bay and is leading a review into services in East Kent said that some units “aren’t able or won’t learn and improve.”

Speaking at a Health and Social Care Select Committee, he added: “There are some units that actively conceal what they are doing.

“When they get in sufficient trouble, their response is to stop communicating with the outside world and to disguise the failings that they’ve got.

“I think they do that with the intention that they can sort it all out themselves before they have to tell anybody. But it’s quite difficult to get past that barrier when units get into that slippery slope of declining standards.”

 Professor Ted Baker - Teri Pengilley
Professor Ted Baker - Teri Pengilley

During a three hour session, the Committee heard damning evidence from safety experts, health officials and a grieving mother on maternity safety in English hospitals.

The chief inspector of hospitals in England warned that without improvements in culture there could be a "constant stream" of maternity services running into difficulties.

Professor Ted Baker said that some elements of poor care identified in the review into the Morecambe Bay maternity scandal, issues to do with dysfunctional team working, a defensive culture and poor investigations with no lessons being learned, were still being found in other maternity services.

“Maternity services are improving - it’s important to emphasise that,” he said.

“We shouldn’t forget that they are improving, but my perception is that they are not improving fast enough - they can improve faster.”

They also heard from grieving mother, Michelle Hemmington, who described her treatment when her baby died from hypoxia.

Ms Hemmington, co-founder Campaign for Safer Births, described the death of her son Louie in 2011, half an hour after he was born.

She described how she fought for four and a half years to get the recognition from the hospital that it caused the death of her son, but she did not receive a formal apology.

Failures which led to her son's death included staff not following resuscitation guidelines and a failure to monitor foetal wellbeing.

"Losing Louis is something I will never fully recover from," she said.

"I feel his loss every day."