Poor quality maternity care will become normalised if urgent action is not taken, warns NHS regulator.
A Care Quality Commission (CQC) report based on inspections of 131 maternity units across the NHS highlighted issues with staffing, buildings, equipment and the way safety was managed, and found that none of them were ‘fit for purpose’.
Nicola Wise, CQC’s director of secondary and specialist care called for collective action as a healthcare system to address the shortfalls in care.
‘This starts with a robust focus on safety to ensure that poor care and preventable harm do not become normalised, and that staff are supported to deliver the high-quality care they want to provide for mothers and babies today and in the future. While some of those things are within the power of hospital leaders to address, there are others that require increased national action and additional capital investment, with money ring-fenced for safer maternity services spent where it will make a difference.’
The CQC report follows several high-profile inquiries into the quality of maternity care, such as the Ockenden Review into more than 200 baby deaths at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and the investigation into life-changing injuries and deaths of babies in East Kent.
Of the 131 units inspected by the health watchdog as part of a national programme between August 2022 and December 2023, almost half (48%) were rated as requiring improvement or inadequate. No services inspected were rated outstanding for safety, with 65% failing in safety standards.
The report also expressed concern about delays to emergency Caesareans, cramped, noisy and overheated wards, triage problems, with women facing delays being assessed and not being prioritised properly and evidence of discrimination against people belonging to ethnic minorities, including a lack of support for women whose first language was not English.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting described the CQC’s findings as a ‘cause for national shame,’ and was one of the ‘biggest issues that keeps me awake at night’.
He said: ‘We’re keen to make sure that when it comes to the work that Donna Ockenden [chair of inquiry into maternity failings at Shrewsbury Hospital] has already done, we make sure that those lessons are applied, not just in the case of those specific trusts, that actually right across the country. We are determined to get this right.’