Ockenden Report

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. I am pleased to respond today, not just as the shadow Minister for patient safety, but as a woman and a new mother. I thank Donna Ockenden and her team for the report. I also thank the families who have come forward; we would not be here today without the persistence and resilience that they have shown for more than 20 years in their fight for justice.

Today marks an important milestone for hundreds of families who have been seeking justice. The Ockenden report lays bare the harrowing truth of what those families had to face and why their fight for justice has been such a fierce one: cries for help going unheard; parents having to try to resuscitate their children because there was no one there to help; and women and babies dying needlessly because they simply were not listened to.

The fact that women were silenced and ignored at their most vulnerable, when they were relying on the NHS to keep them safe, is shameful. No woman should have to face not knowing, when she goes into hospital to give birth, whether she and her baby will come out alive. These were not one-off or isolated incidents of negligence. This was the institutional failure of a system that failed to take up many opportunities to realise that it had a serious problem. We are where we are today because of the persistence and resilience of those families and their refusal to give up the fight to expose those failings. The only comfort we can offer them is that their voices have been heard, and that we are committing today, across this House, to ensuring that those failings are never repeated.

For far too long, patient safety issues and the voices of women have been an afterthought in health; that has led to the kind of crises that we saw in Shrewsbury. This needs to change. Patient safety must be a priority for health professionals and Ministers, so I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State has today committed in full to ensuring that the local actions for learning are taken by Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and to all the immediate and essential actions in the wider system that are recommended. Will the Secretary of State come to the House later this year to update us on the progress of those actions? The report makes it clear that a safe service cannot be run without a culture of transparency and accountability, so will he set out how he intends to ensure an open culture in the health service with a willingness to learn within maternity services and identify future failings far more quickly?

Underpinning issues in maternity care, as is the case across so much of our NHS, is workforce. Only 10 months ago, as a first-time mother, I experienced just how stretched to the limit maternity services are. The NHS is now losing midwives faster than it can recruit them. A recent CQC survey shows that almost a quarter of women were unable to get help when they needed it during labour. Hundreds of pregnant women were turned away from maternity wards last year because staff were not available to care for them. What is the Secretary of State doing to ensure that the NHS recruits the midwives it needs? What is he doing to keep the midwives we have in post?

It is only with the necessary workforce that the NHS will be able to ensure that women receive care that meets their needs and prioritises their safety. That security and respect is all that the families who suffered so much at Shrewsbury want, and it is all that the women who put their own and their babies’ lives in the hands of the NHS want.