Maternity investigator Donna Ockenden has criticised a new report into NHS failings and thrown doubt on whether she would accept the job of national maternity commissioner if offered it.
Ms Ockenden is widely trusted by bereaved families and last week published a report into 520 cases of avoidable harm and death at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.
She is also due to chair independent reviews into poor maternity care at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust.
Speaking on Tuesday, she was asked about a new report from Baroness Valerie Amos, which calls for urgent action on maternity and a need to listen to women and families.
The Government has responded by saying it will appoint the new national maternity commissioner recommended by Lady Amos to drive forward change.
Asked if she would take on the role, Ms Ockenden told Times Radio: “So that’s an interesting question.
“I did sign the petition for the maternity commissioner. If you look, you’ll find Donna Ockenden’s name on it.
“I was supportive of it as a role, however the excellent report that led to that recommendation was May 2024 and the issue is that time doesn’t stand still.
“Maternity services have not improved in the last two years, and my concern now is, can one person actually fix this system, where indeed I think it needs concerted, timely, urgent action from Secretary of State right down to the ground. Let’s not wait any longer.”
She said she understood “where this role came from”, adding: “You will know that I’m really rather busy with other reviews across the country, and I wouldn’t want to be a failure because of lack of time or lack of focus or effort by others who should be doing more.”
Asked about the substance of Lady Amos’s report, she said: “I’m really grateful to Baroness Amos and her team for gathering together all this evidence.
“But I’ve looked at it overnight and I don’t see anything that we didn’t already know, that hasn’t already been spelled out very clearly.
“And so what we need to do is get on and fix the problem.”
She added: “I am disappointed that you know we’re seeing the same themes over and over again, but it hasn’t taught me anything new, sadly.”
Asked if the recommendations, including more doctors working on site at weekends, would make a difference, she said: “No, absolutely not.”
She told Times Radio: “I mean, let’s just look at perinatal workforce. I speak to all kinds of doctors up and down the country every single day of the week.
“We know that we’ve got significant gaps in medical rotas in most trusts in the country.
“Since last week when my report was published, I’ve been contacted by resident trainee doctors across the country who are saying ‘we don’t think that we can even complete our training now’, so we’ve got a real risk that people are going to walk away from obstetrics and midwifery, so adding extra responsibilities doesn’t seem to make any sense to me.”
She said the Government had said last week that its action plan would be published in December.
“I said then that was absolutely unacceptable. We don’t have six months, we don’t have time on our side. I think we have to have a renewed focus on listening to women and families.”
Asked if ministers were listening to her, she said: “I think that at the time Shrewsbury (her maternity investigation report) was published in May 2022 we had the Right Honourable Sajid Javid MP in role as health secretary.
“I think if he had stayed, I’m absolutely convinced we would have made better progress.
“But where we are now is, I think, there’s a real risk we’re still going backwards – maternal deaths increasing, stillbirths at a higher level than before the pandemic, so nowhere near enough progress is being made, and loading further pressure on frontline doctors and midwives is just not going to wash.”
The Maternity Safety Alliance, made up of bereaved families who want a statutory public inquiry, said a national maternity commissioner in the format proposed by Lady Amos is “dangerous” as it concentrates power too narrowly.
It comes as the Health Service Journal (HSJ) reported that the chairman of inquiries into maternity scandals at Morecambe Bay and East Kent resigned from Lady Amos’s review in a dispute over “normal birth ideology”.
Dr Bill Kirkup stepped down from his position as expert adviser to the review, with HSJ reporting it was due to him wanting a stronger line on the patient safety consequences of a normal birth ideology than Lady Amos would agree to.
Lady Amos said in her review they “did not find that ‘normal birth ideology’ was currently widespread in the maternity services we visited in England”.
Asked about Dr Kirkup resigning, Ms Ockenden said: “I have known Dr Kirkup for many, many years.
“In our Nottingham report, we talked about a normalisation of deviance.
“We gave lots and lots of examples in Nottingham, but I do believe it’s a national issue, where women were denied Caesarean sections when they begged for Caesarean sections with often tragic circumstances and tragic outcomes as a result.
“I think it goes way beyond medical misogyny. I think that’s an unfair label because what we found was a culture that infected the unit in Nottingham, and it wasn’t just doctors. I need to be really clear about that.”
Earlier, Lady Amos was asked whether there is a need for a statutory inquiry as requested by families.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s not my decision to make…
“I absolutely understand and respect the call for a public inquiry that some families are making. I said to those families at the outset that I could not, through a system review, deliver the justice that they were seeking for their babies.
“What I do feel very strongly is that if we make the changes that I am recommending, then in the future the kinds of justice that are being sought will be delivered.
“My personal view is that statutory public inquiries take such a long time that the changes that I am proposing, which I would like to see start now, that this could have a transformational impact on the system, and we would not need a statutory public inquiry.
“But that is a personal view and I absolutely understand why some families are calling for one.”
Lady Amos also defended the idea of a maternity commissioner.
She said it is “not about concentrating power in the hands of one person, it is about saying that you need an independent voice and advocate for women and families who, as an independent statutory appointee, is able to have oversight of the implementation of all the recommendations in this report to drive change, to report back to families, to report to Parliament.”
Health Secretary James Murray was also asked whether campaigners were wrong to call for a statutory public inquiry.
He told BBC Breakfast: “They’re not wrong to call for that. I can understand where that feeling comes from very strongly, a very strong desire for real accountability for people who have been involved in some of the failings in maternity services, or involved in covering things up when they’ve gone wrong.
“I know from talking to families that some people favour a public inquiry, others have a different view on that.
“At this stage, I’m not taking anything off the table but I think that focus on accountability is crucial.”
