Yvette Cooper, who was the first Government minister to take maternity leave, has vowed to reconfigure maternity services in the UK as part of a root-and-branch review
The Government will introduce national maternity standards as part of plans to improve maternity care in the UK, the Health Secretary has said.
Yvette Cooper has promised a root-and-branch review of national maternity standards following a series of damning scandals, and said no woman should feel under pressure to have an “ideal birth”. Cooper, a former minister for public health under Tony Blair and the first in British history to take maternity leave, said she was aiming for a maternity culture change which should address expectations for women giving birth.
It comes after mothers told the Mirror they experienced “traumatic” births while delivering on the NHS and called for urgent reform, and reports raising the alarm repeatedly about the reported unwillingness of some maternity units to escalate interventions over a desire for natural births.
Cooper, who has previously said she found reports of maternity scandals “traumatic”, told the Guardian it is a “personal crusade” to “put the cradle back at the heart of the NHS”. She said: “We’ve always said the NHS is about the cradle to the grave. I want to make it a personal crusade to put the cradle back at the heart of the NHS, and to have much more focus around maternity and child health, the very beginning of a family’s life, making that much more central to the priorities of the NHS, giving it the priority that it really deserves.”
Cooper added that she felt an emphasis on the need for maternity services to focus on mothers’ needs has been lost, despite discussions on the subject having continued for years. She added: “It feels incomprehensible that we could be in this situation in the 2020s.
“I went back to look at some of the things that we’d done 25 years ago. And what did strike me was how much we were talking then about women and families being at the centre of care and about listening to women’s views. It is really shocking and distressing feeling that has somehow been lost in some of the maternity units where actually it should be the central issue.
“I had a direct interest. I was pregnant at the time. But I am really struck by it now, just feeling like there is this big gap in the priorities that the NHS has been focused on.” Maternity care in the UK has been found to be lacking in key areas, and mothers have told the Mirror of their horror experiences when going to give birth.
A joint investigation carried out by the Mirror and Dad Shift heard from Jorden and Vicky Eadon-Guest, 36 and 41, who realised a “dream” when they learned they were pregnant following a “difficult journey”.
But Vicky had a nightmare experience after giving birth to her daughter Isla by C-section at Worcestershire Royal Hospital. Vicky was still bleeding and felt increasingly unwell after the delivery, and buzzed for help all night – only to receive a single answer. She said: “When I stood up there was a lot of blood, on the bed, on the floor… I felt shaky, like I could fall.”
When marketing manager Jorden came back the next morning he found Vicky very hot and dizzy. But they were discharged nevertheless, only for Vicky to be readmitted to hospital days later. She said: “I was readmitted to hospital via A&E, suffering from a severe infection and internal bleeding, and needing intravenous antibiotics”.
In June, an NHS maternity review found that more than 500 babies and mums suffered harm or died after receiving care at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH), a scandal dubbed one of the worst in NHS history.
Cooper has vowed a robust response to the Nottingham report, and another which found major trust-level failures in Shrewsbury and Telford. The reviews highlighted persistent clinical errors, understaffing, and toxic institutional cultures which have shown hundreds of infant and maternal deaths could be directly attributed to a refused to listen to new and expectant mums.