Over 150 baby deaths linked to UK maternity scandal – Report

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More than 500 mothers and babies suffered potentially avoidable harm or died due to poor care at a UK hospital, according to a damning report published Wednesday, in the country’s latest maternity scandal.

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At least 156 cases involved the death of babies, and six mothers also died at two units run by Nottingham University Hospitals Trust in central England.

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The independent probe was the largest maternity inquiry in the history of the state-run National Health Service (NHS), involving over 2,500 families in cases spanning 13 years from 2012-2025.

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It comes after a string of other investigations in recent years highlighted a crisis in England’s care of mothers and babies.

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Sarah and Jack Hawkins’ daughter Harriet should have been born healthy, but was stillborn in 2016. The couple were both senior clinicians at the trust at the time.

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“I just can’t compute … how they did this to us and how they did this to all these families,” said Sarah Hawkins, a physiotherapist, after the report’s publication.

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“Our concerns were dismissed and not acted upon. We weren’t told the truth about what happened, even after death,” added Jack Hawkins.

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The former doctor at the trust said the findings marked the end of a “relentless and at times almost unbearable 10-year campaign” to learn the truth about the failings.

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– ‘Toxic’ –

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Report author senior midwife Donna Ockenden found a “bullying and toxic culture” at the trust’s two maternity hospitals “infected” by a “small minority of powerful leaders”.

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She slammed baby Harriet’s “avoidable death” which was “compounded by a systemic cover-up and investigations designed to mislead”.

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Of the babies who died there were 94 stillbirths and 62 cases in which babies died shortly after birth from a range of conditions, including oxygen starvation and hospital-acquired infections, according to Ockenden.

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The cases included Wynter Andrews, whose parents were wrongly told in 2019 to terminate a healthy pregnancy.

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Her father Gary Andrews, said a clinician had told him that “if we listened to every mother’s concerns, we’d be overrun”.

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“I think now I can respond to that and say if you’d listened to every mother’s concerns, there would be hundreds of mothers, babies, still alive,” he said.

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In parliament, Health Minister James Murray described the report’s findings as “chilling” and said regulators had been more concerned about “protecting clinicians” than providing accountability.

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He said he had been “appalled by the neglect, incompetence, racism, discrimination, contempt and harassment that so many suffered” and pledged an action plan by the end of the year.

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Maternity care scandals have been exposed at a number of other hospital trusts, including East Kent, Morecambe Bay, and Shrewsbury and Telford.

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