Wes Streeting has been urged by an expert to get on with tackling long-standing problems in NHS maternity care rather than setting up another public inquiry.
The Health Secretary said this week he is ‘keeping open the option’ of launching a nationwide probe given ‘widespread and endemic’ failings in labour wards.
But the midwife behind major reviews into baby deaths in hospitals said the main areas of concern have been known for more than a decade yet little progress had been made in fixing them.
Donna Ockenden told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday: ‘I can see exactly where he’s coming from, but I think that there are key issues that have needed resolution in maternity services for years now.
‘They are workforce, they are training, they are funding, education and culture. That hasn’t changed, I don’t think, since at least 2010 and had we acted on those areas when we should have, then I think we would be in a much better state now.’
In 2022 she set out 22 ‘immediate and essential actions’ to improve maternity safety, in a report into mother and baby deaths at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust.
But Ms Ockenden, who is now reviewing maternity services at the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, said there had been ‘very disappointing progress’ since then.
‘I think that we must now move to the implementation of these key issues,’ she said.
Midwife Donna Ockenden in 2022 presenting the final report into her review of maternity services at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust
Some families are calling for a full public inquiry into the failings of NHS maternity services (stock image)
A rapid review of maternity care nationwide is also being carried out by Labour peer Baroness Amos, but Ms Ockenden again suggested that the issues it is looking into are already well-known.
Asked if the review will solve problems with the maternity workforce, training and culture, Ms Ockenden replied: ‘I hope so. I really, really hope so.
‘But I do think that we know what we need to do, and we should now be in the implementation part of this process, not still thinking about things.’
Asked if she thought a full public inquiry was not necessary, she insisted: ‘I have huge respect and an enormous amount of time for the families who are calling for a public inquiry. I fully appreciate where they are coming from.
‘They are often families who have suffered the most appalling life-changing harm. And they say, “we don’t want this to happen to anyone else. What has happened to us mustn’t happen to anyone else”.
‘And they’re still sitting there, sometimes, two, four five, 10 years after this life-changing harm, and they say, ‘”well, what’s going on?”’