Maternity Services: Gloucestershire

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) on securing this important debate. Maternity services affect every single one of us at least once in our lives, so it is important that we protect them to ensure that, for all of us, that moment—obviously, many of us experience it more than once—is a safe one.

I will not mention all the hon. Members who have spoken, but I am pleased to see so many of my Liberal Democrat colleagues, who have all made excellent speeches and powerful points. I particularly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young) for sharing her experience, and the hon. Members for Gloucester (Alex McIntyre) and for Stroud (Dr Opher) and my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas) for sharing theirs. Obviously, the hon. Member for Stroud has his own medical expertise, which is very important. Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Dr Chambers) described his constituent’s shocking experience, which I think we were all upset to hear about.

This is not the first debate we have had on maternity services—not even the first in this Parliament—and the reason for that is the shocking under-investment in those services. On 19 September, during recess, the Care Quality Commission issued a report, and its contents are hugely disappointing if not surprising. As has been mentioned, it spoke of the risk of normalising avoidable harm, which is an unacceptable situation to be in.

Hon. Members might be aware that my interest in maternity care came about because I am from Shropshire—I represent North Shropshire—and my constituents Kayleigh and Colin Griffiths lost their daughter Pippa at Shrewsbury and Telford hospital NHS trust. They fought tooth and nail alongside Rhiannon Davies and her husband Richard Stanton to bring about the Ockenden review into the scandal that unfolded at the trust.

Since then we have had a report on East Kent, and there is a review going on in Nottingham. None of that is news to us, which is shocking. I sat on the all-party parliamentary group on birth trauma, which was brilliantly led by the former Member for Stafford, Theo Clarke, and on the baby loss APPG, and I am currently trying to reconstitute the maternity APPG. All those groups have found the same failings over and over again.

The CQC report tells us what we already know: 40% of maternity services are rated as requiring improvement and 18% are rated inadequate. That means that less than half are rated as acceptable, which is not excusable, particularly given that we have had so many high-profile scandals and so many commitments—I believe they were made in good faith—from the Dispatch Box that these things will not happen again, but they are happening every single day.

We know from all those reports that unsafe staffing is at the root of most of the problems and that it is pushing hard-working midwives, in particular, to the brink. They work their socks off to share in what should be the most joyful moment of each individual’s life. When I had my baby nearly 16 years ago in an emergency situation, the midwife, who had been with me all afternoon, stayed on at the end of her shift to make sure that I and my baby were okay. We received excellent care and were both fine in the end, thank goodness. However, we have all relied so much on the good will of those individuals that they are experiencing burnout at an alarming rate.

I was canvassing in my constituency during the general election when a midwife came running across the road in her dressing gown and slippers to tell me that she was emigrating because she had had enough and that two other midwives she knew in the county were taking the same step because they had experienced burnout on such a shocking level. Any workforce plan needs to deal urgently with that problem.

Staffing is one problem, but unsuitable buildings are another. In the shocking inquiry into the Lucy Letby case at the Countess of Chester hospital, which is slightly unrelated, I read that sewage was coming up into the hospital’s sinks. How can we control infection when there is literally raw sewage in the building? It is unacceptable. We need to ensure that this Budget invests not just in the GPs, healthcare workers and midwives we so urgently need, but in the fabric of our hospitals.

We have repeatedly heard that there is a failure to learn when things go wrong and that hospitals focus too much on protecting their reputation rather than on learning from terrible mistakes that might have happened—and that will inevitably happen on occasion, even with the best staff in the world, because sometimes things go wrong. Hospitals must learn from those mistakes.

Finally, there is a failure among hospitals to have an open culture, so staff who have concerns are unable to raise them. The duty of candour law, to which the Government have committed, is so important, and I urge the Minister to ensure that the people to whom workers in hospitals can speak up are independent of the hospital manager and the clinical director. If workers are reporting to the person responsible for giving them their jobs, that is not a safe process. We must have independent whistleblowing procedures for people raising clinical concerns. I am sure my constituents share my anger that we have to return to this topic again and again, when we should be looking at how far we have come since the Ockenden review over two years ago.

I want to touch on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean) about outcomes. Black and Asian women and their babies have a far worse probability of surviving birth than white women. If that was happening in a single trust, we would have another big, important review, but because it is spread out across the country, it is being lost, so we must return to it. It is not acceptable in this country in the 21st century that ethnic or socioeconomic background is a determinant of whether having a baby is safe. We are not on track to meet our 2025 targets for reducing stillbirth and neonatal death, and those targets have not been renewed. I urge the Minister to renew them and to ensure that there is a plan in place to meet them.

Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester made the critical point that spending more on medical negligence than maternity services is totally unacceptable. This country cannot afford for that to continue. We must make maternity services safe, because it is better for the mothers, better for the babies and better for the taxpayer. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.