What will it take for this country to extract itself from a frankly abusive, co-dependent relationship with the bullying, sometimes downright dangerous NHS? How about 300 dead or damaged babies? Is that dark and dismaying enough to make us question whether our health service really is “the envy of the world”?
Three hundred is the heartrending number of infants who either died or were left with brain damage due to cruel or wilfully wrongheaded care at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust (SaTH) between 2000 and 2019, according to a report by senior midwife Donna Ockendon, which is published on Wednesday. Think of it. Three hundred tiny boys and girls with perfect fingers and perfect toes; the movie of their marvellous life to come playing behind their softly fluttering baby eyelids. Three hundred longed-for daughters and sons, their birthdays – and their death days – never to be forgotten. “My twins would have been doing GCSEs this year,” said one mother.
At least 12 women perished in that same trust, thanks to an obsession with “normal births”, and because there was pressure within the NHS to reduce caesarean rates. Costs, you know. By 2002, SaTH had the lowest C-section rate in the country, for which it was actually praised by the Commons Health Select Committee – but babies were dying.
Kamaljit Uppal pleaded for a caesarean because her baby was breech. A doctor told her to get on with delivering. Only when the baby was firmly stuck, with two legs protruding, was his mother finally allowed to go to the operating theatre. Kamaljit has two pieces of paper among her most precious possessions; one is her son Manpreet’s birth certificate, the other a death certificate. Both are dated April 2003. The time on them is just two hours apart. Our NHS did that to Manpreet and his mother.
It wasn’t just in Shropshire either, although the lying NHS will lie to the public and say that it was. (An expert panel is currently looking into another “baby death scandal” at East Kent Hospitals. There will be more to come.) We know how this goes, don’t we? A few bad apples, sincere apologies, won’t happen again, lessons to be learnt. But they knew. There were maternity units that had bad reports from the Care Quality Commisison, the NHS regulator, because their C-sections stats were “too high”. Penalised for putting safety first.
They knew. At SaTH, the C-section rate was eight to 12 per cent lower than the UK average of about 30 per cent, but mortality rates in the trust’s maternity and neonatal services were running at least 10 per cent higher than at equivalent hospitals. In April 2017, the then Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt ordered an independent review into 23 cases of newborn, infant and mother deaths at SaTH. A year later, when the inquiry was widened because 16 more grieving families had come forward, Simon Wright, the trust’s chief executive, said: “To suggest that there are more cases which have not been revealed when this is simply untrue is irresponsible and scaremongering. This will cause unnecessary anxiety among women going through one of the most important times of their life, and I would like to assure them that our maternity services are a safe environment with dedicated, caring staff.”
Scaremongering? There, ladies and gentlemen, you have the arrogant, disgustingly complacent tone of the senior NHS apparatchik. I mean, how dare mums who have lost perfectly healthy babies and husbands who have lost their beloved wives challenge the sacred health service before which we must all bow down?
If hundreds of babies were dying or having their skulls fractured during painfully drawn-out labours, well, at least they were doing so in Wright’s “safe environment”. The local clinical commissioning group, which ordered its own review of SaTH maternity services in 2013, also concluded, astonishingly, that they were “safe and of good quality”. Whenever possible, the NHS prefers to mark its own homework.
The NHS groupthink about “natural birth” had its origins in the Active Birth Movement, which began in the 1980s as a reaction to the over-medicalisation of childbirth. The movement had a point. An earlier NHS policy, called Active Management, was intended to standardise labour to a maximum of 12 hours per woman. To achieve that, interventions became routine – induction of labour via amniotomy (breaking the waters), and a syntocinon drip to speed up contractions.
But the idealism of the earth mothers soon hardened into ideology. They harked back to a time when women were “last firmly in control of birth – in the 17th century”. No one seemed concerned by the dire survival rate for mothers and babies in the centuries before obstetrics.
I have no doubt that brainwashed midwives played a major role in the tragedy at SaTH. The “Wait and See” campaign by the Royal College of Midwives advised that C-sections “shouldn’t be the first choice – they should be the last”. Let mum get on with it and if, after 24 hours, baby was showing signs of distress, drag the poor mite out with high forceps and ventouse suction, leaving mum partially incontinent and baby with a head as pointy as a dunce’s cap. If you were lucky, that is. Three hundred, they were not lucky.
My daughter could easily have been among them. I had both my babies in the era those SaTH deaths were taking place. My first birth plan was in tatters from the minute they decided to induce me. Instead of Mozart playing, there was a drip in my arm which caused contractions like giant waves smashing against the shore. After 25 hours of that, a registrar popped in, took one look at my cervix, which was about as dilated as a Polo mint, and said, “Let’s get this baby out!”
She weighed 9lb 10oz and, with her daddy’s brainy cranium, there was no way that little Miss was coming out the front door. At almost any other time in history, we would have died, baby and I. Thank God for UCH, which is a great London teaching hospital and not an outfit in Shropshire where, according to one witness, “the CEO ran the place like a fiefdom free of quality standards”.
