At least 42 babies and three mothers died at maternity wards covered by a single hospital trust due to a ‘toxic’ culture, a leaked report has claimed.
Children were also left with disabilities as a result of substandard care at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust in what could possibly be the largest maternity scandal in NHS history.
Staff at the trust routinely dismissed parents’ concerns, were unkind and got dead babies’ names wrong, according to the document seen by The Independent.
In one troubling case, parents were not told their baby’s body had arrived back from the post-mortem examination, and it was left to decompose so badly the family never got to say goodbye properly.
The interim update report comes from an independent inquiry led by maternity expert Donna Ockenden, which was launched by former health secretary Jeremy Hunt in July 2017.
Rhiannon and Richard Stanton Davies, whose daughter Kate died shortly after birth in 2009, were part of the reason the inquiry was launched after they campaigned for it.
Ms Davies told The Independent the leaked report showed the trust had ‘condemned my daughter to death’, adding: ‘How has this been tolerated for so long? It is horrific.’
In the report, Ms Ockenden wrote: ‘No apology will be sufficient or adequate for families who lost loved ones to avoidable deaths, or whose experience of becoming a parent was blighted by poor care and avoidable harm.
‘Many families have described to me how they live on a daily basis with the results of that poor care.’
The report also criticised the trust’s slow response in sending the inquiry medical records, clinical notes and other documents and warned lessons had still not be learned today and communication with families was still lacking.
The study’s initial scope was to examine 23 cases but it eventually grew to more than 270 covering the period 1979 to the present day.
The cases include 22 stillbirths, three deaths during pregnancy, 17 deaths of babies after birth, three deaths of mothers, 47 cases of substandard care and 51 cases of cerebral palsy or brain damage.
Until now, Morecambe Bay, which saw the avoidable deaths of 11 babies and one mother at Cumbria’s Furness General Hospital between 2004 and 2013, was the worst ever maternity scandal in the UK.
Ms Ockenden said in a statement the report was produced at the request of NHS Improvement and was not meant for publication.
The study also criticised carried out by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) that it called inadequate.
Paula Clark, interim chief executive at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, added: ‘On behalf of the trust, I apologise unreservedly to the families who have been affected.
‘I would like to reassure all families using our maternity services that we have not been waiting for Donna Ockenden’s final report before working to improve our services.
‘A lot has already been done to address the issues raised by previous cases.
