Maternity units in England have the poorest safety ratings of any hospital service that is inspected by the country’s healthcare regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), according to the regulator in an interview with BBC News. Analysis by the broadcaster of CQC records showed that two-thirds of maternity units are deemed not safe enough, up from 55% last autumn. The “deterioration” follows efforts to improve NHS maternity care and is partly blamed on a shortage of midwives. The BBC analysis revealed that the proportion of maternity units with the lowest safety ranking of “inadequate” has more than doubled from 7% to 15% since September 2020.
A midwife shortage is cited as one of the reasons behind the failure. The Department of Health and Social Care stated that £165m a year was being invested in improving the maternity workforce, but admitted that “we know there is more to do”. The regulator has conducted focused inspections due to concerns about maternity care. These findings are the worst since they began identifying the data in this way in 2018, said Kate Terroni, the CQC’s deputy chief executive.
Rachel Tustain, whose daughter Eve was injured during her birth in 2016, previously stated that she believed maternity services were “massively under-resourced, massively underfunded”, which was leading to safety issues. Eve suffered a bleed to her brain after “the incorrect application of forceps” during her delivery at Pinderfields Hospital, Wakefield, and died last year, aged five. The Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS Trust admitted liability and apologised for the poor care Rachel and Eve received. They added that “significant changes” had been made in the trust’s maternity services since Eve’s birth.
Currently, 10% of maternity units are ranked overall as “inadequate”, 40% as “requires improvement”, 47% as “good” and 3% as “outstanding”. These figures take into account a rise in the number of units the regulator inspects, from 137 to 178 in that period. This was because of changes in the way the CQC assesses maternity services. The decline in safety ratings occurred despite several attempts to transform maternity care, including an NHS programme launched in 2016, triggered by an inquiry in 2015 following a series of failures leading to the deaths of newborn babies at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust.
The government says it is “working incredibly hard to improve maternity services, focusing on recruitment, training, and the retention of midwives”. The decline in safety is alarming, and health officials must address the issues within the maternity services affecting mums and their newborns
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