Yvette Cooper says mums and infants handled like ‘second class sufferers’ in damning evaluation

EXCLUSIVE: Women and children are being treated like ‘second class patients’ after years of neglect of maternity services, the Health Secretary has said

Women and children are being treated like “second class patients” after years of neglect of maternity services, the Health Secretary has said.

Yvette Cooper said she was determined to eradicate the postcode lottery of care for mums and babies, in the wake of a string of damning maternity scandals. She described her horror at discovering there were no national maternity standards for the health service, which were abandoned by the Tories.

The issue is personal for Ms Cooper, who was the first Government minister to take maternity leave when she served as health minister for maternity services under Tony Blair. Sitting down with The Mirror in the Department of Health and Social Care, she looked at old photos of herself visiting maternity units, while pregnant with her son.

But despite more than 25 years away, many of the same problems are on her desk. She said: “So many things now feel so similar, going back round the same circles again. Because we’re two years into a Labour government again and we’ve again come in after, frankly, the damage that I think the Conservatives have done to the NHS in the meantime. It has just been scandalous.”

Ms Cooper added: “The last Labour government I was in had to rebuild the NHS, and now it feels that our most important task now is to rebuild the NHS again.”

One of her first acts on entering office was to announce plans to introduce binding national maternity standards. She said: “They were just allowed to lapse more than 10 years ago, under the Conservatives. They just abandoned all of those national standards frameworks, and so for me, it just feels there’s been a shameful neglect of some of those areas, and we have to make sure that this is a priority again to have those standards in place.”

She added: “It doesn’t feel as though maternity has been taken seriously enough by the NHS. When you look at all of those reviews, it all tells similar stories about mums not being listened to, about problems in maternity services not being taken seriously by the board, not being looked at.

“It feels as though it’s just been mums and babies being treated like second-class patients, and I am determined that mums and babies will not be treated as second-class patients. Nye Bevan talked about the ‘cradle to the grave’ and yet it feels like nobody’s been looking out for the cradle.”

The standards will be drawn up by a maternity taskforce, and will focus on issues like ending the postcode lottery of care and stamping out racial inequalities which have meant worse outcomes for Black and Asian women. She also plans to appoint a maternity commissioner to help drive the overhaul of standards.

It comes after shocking stories such as women in North Devon being offered advice on how to give birth in their car after the sudden closure of a local maternity unit.

The Health Secretary hit back at critics in the health sector, who described her maternity crusade as too narrow when she announced it earlier this year.

She said: “Hang on, sorry. More than half a million babies are born in the NHS every year. That is more people than have hip and knee operations put together.

“So this is really important, and it’s the very start of life. If you want families to have the very best start in life, you have to make sure things don’t go wrong in maternity. But you also have to make sure that families get the support they need before, during, after, and in those crucial early years as well.”

Meanwhile, Ms Cooper said the NHS must prepare for crises all year round, after a summer of extreme heat piled pressure on hospitals.

She said: “There was a quarter of a million additional attendances at A&E this summer compared to the previous summer because of the extreme heat, and so that is a real heavy pressure on the A&E on the NHS during the summer.

“I think it does mean now that we’ve traditionally had winter plans in place for those pressures. We have to now have summer pressure plans in place, and I’ve made that clear to the NHS.

“There has to be proper planning for extreme heat in the summer, and and that’s got to be an important part of what the NHS does, I think the NHS responded really strongly, so managed to keep responding despite all of the additional pressures that they were facing.

“But it does mean we’ve got to do seasonal planning for all times of the year, which is completely different from 25 years ago, we weren’t even thinking about that.”

And as winter approaches, Ms Cooper will grapple with one of the most acute examples of pressure in the NHS – corridor care. NHS trusts are battling to eradicate scenes of sick patients being treated on trolleys due to a lack of beds.

A damning report by the Royal College of Nursing described corridor care as a “type of torture” in January. Testimonies from nurses described staff being forced to treat patients in freezing corridors, dining rooms, staff kitchens and offices, with examples of a patient left in a chair for four days, while another died after choking, undetected in a corridor.

Ms Cooper said: “Corridor care is completely unacceptable. Nobody should be being treated in a corridor at a time when they’re in an emergency situation.”

But she declined to put a timescale on her ambition to end treatment in corridors. She said: “We’re working on what can be done, and particularly through the winter, and also more broadly to make sure areas are all trying to address this.”

Another huge issue in her in-tray is social care, which has been kicked into the long grass by successive governments. Andy Burnham has promised to overhaul the crisis-hit sector, saying it is a “dereliction of public duty” by politicians who have failed to come up with answers.

Mr Burnham said the experience of his father Roy – who was in a care home before his death earlier this month – had fuelled his desire to fix the system.

Ms Cooper said: “I think there have been 22 different reviews or attempts to overhaul social care since I was first elected to Parliament.

“Andy [Burnham] has been really clear how much he cares personally and passionately about this, and how determined he is to make sure that we work right across the government to make sure that this can change and that families just aren’t let down in the same way in future.

“So it’s his vision for a national care service alongside a national health service, but we obviously wait for the Casey Commission and also some of the cross-party talks as well around how we build a consensus on that.”

Ms Cooper is working to appoint a dementia tsar and to fast-track care for motor neurone disease, a cause she’s passionate about after getting to know the late rugby league legend Rob Burrow, who was her constituent.