Families welcome independent inquiry into maternity services at NHS Trust

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Grieving families have welcomed the launch of an independent investigation into the maternity and neonatal services practices at an NHS Trust where they say their babies were failed.

The parents say they felt gaslit, dismissed and even blamed for what went wrong at Leeds Teaching Hospitals (LTH) NHS Trust.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who met the families on Thursday, said he was “shocked” by their experiences of “repeated maternity failures in Leeds – made worse by the unacceptable response of the trust”.

Despite running one of the largest teaching hospitals in Europe, “it remains an outlier on perinatal mortality,” according to official data.

Mr Streeting added: “This stark contradiction between scale and safety standards is precisely why I’m taking this exceptional step to order an urgent inquiry in Leeds.

“We have to give the families the honesty and accountability they deserve and end the normalisation of deaths of women and babies in maternity units.

“These are people who, at a moment of great vulnerability, placed their lives and the lives of their unborn children in the hands of others – and instead of being supported and cared for, found themselves victims.”

The families are waiting for the terms of reference of the investigation to be confirmed, but feel the police should be involved.

They also called for it to be chaired by the “rigorous” leadership of midwife Donna Ockenden, who is heading the independent review of maternity services at the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Fiona Winser-Ramm, whose daughter Aliona died in 2020 after what an inquest found to be a number of failures, is “welcoming the inquiry to ensure that it’s the best and most thorough that it can possibly be and it is imperative that Donna Ockenden is appointed to lead this review”.

She added: “We have all been thrust into this life that none of us should be living.

“None of us should know each other. The only place that we should ever potentially have become friends is through a baby or a child playgroup – instead, we are supporting each other through the worst possible time.

“But this is a compulsion and we have no choice in this matter.

“This is the only way that we can now parent our children. Our girls all deserved a voice. They all deserved a life and we deserved that life with them.

“Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust have stolen that from all of us. We now have to be the voice for our children, but that also goes wider to being the voice for other women and children, because everybody deserves to be safeguarded.”

Her husband, Daniel, believes police should be involved “from a very early stage” of the proceedings, particularly surrounding any potential corporate-level issues.

He said: “I think it’s important the police are involved to get a thorough picture of what is going on.”

LTH is among 14 hospital trusts which will be examined in a national investigation into “failures” in NHS maternity and neonatal services led by Baroness Amos.

A range of services will be put under the spotlight in the investigation, which comes after various independent reviews across multiple trusts found failings, including women’s voices being ignored, safety concerns being overlooked and poor leadership, which has created toxic cultures.

Lauren Caulfield, whose daughter Grace died in the days before her birth in 2022, said: “Something had gone very, very wrong and what I found after was such a refusal to admit their faults, to be honest with me about what had been going on about the failings of individuals, a very, very defensive kind of leadership team.

“I was so dismissed and gaslit and almost blamed for a lot of things that happened in my experiences.”

Attempts to dig deeper led her to other parents who had similar concerns and to the Leeds Hospitals Maternity Family Support Group campaign for answers and improvements.

In June, the Care Quality Commission downgraded the trust to “inadequate”, citing serious risks to women and babies and a deep-rooted “blame culture” that left staff afraid to speak up.

Whistleblowers have warned units remain unsafe, and the BBC reported that at least 56 baby deaths between January 2019 to July 2024 might have been preventable with better care.

The support group is currently 150-strong consisting of bereaved families where the baby or mother has died, been left with a serious injury or there has been a serious near miss, the parents say.

Ms Caulfield said: “Suddenly, I feel quite relieved and vindicated that we are having this independent inquiry to know that our work, our children’s death means something – it can make a difference.

“We are going to get accountability – not just for ourselves, but so many other families, and hopefully, now women will not be going home with empty arms.”

She said the families want Ms Ockenden to lead the inquiry as they feel “no-one else has the experience, the expertise, the trust of families and staff, the compassion and the capability to investigate a trust of this size and we’ve been very clear with the secretary of state that it must be Donna and her team”.

She will also have “the backing of clinicians and patients and everyone else in the system to be able to go in and hold the trust to account – we can’t have somebody who’s relatively junior to do something at this scale,” according to Amarjit Matharoo, whose daughter was stillborn in 2024.

She is feeling “more reassured” that the families’ campaign may one day get answers and lessons will be learned.

Her husband Mandip said: “Leeds is probably (one of) the biggest teaching hospitals in Europe, so it is going to have that knock-on effect, if things can get improved in this hospital, it will be easier to implement the change in the smaller hospitals.”

Mr Matharoo recalls feeling helpless and “on edge” amid the “multiple failings” endured by his family.

To other fathers with unanswered “questions,” he said: “It’s been really tough for my wife and there will be other people that have had similar sorts of scenarios.”

He added: “There’s a lot of fathers out there that don’t want to really talk about it because it’s too triggering. We are just doing our bit to say that it is all right to talk about it and it’s good to get it off your chest.”