By Joe Locker, Local Democracy Reporter
The chair of Nottingham’s maternity review says there have been “lots of concerns in recent months” surrounding care on Queen’s Medical Centre’s early-pregnancy unit.
Senior midwifery expert Donna Ockenden is leading a team to review care at Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH).
The trust runs Nottingham City Hospital and the Queen’s Medical Centre.
Ms Ockenden said 1,998 families were now actively involved in the review, alongside more than 800 staff members.
A further 453 families whose experiences may also be useful to the review are also involved
Nearly 400 of the families have been referred to a new psychological support service.
Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service on Tuesday (November 19), Ms Ockenden said concerns had been raised recently over QMC’s Ward A23.
The Emergency Gynaecology and Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit provides specialist support and care to families who have lost babies.
“[There have been] lots of concerns in recent months around lack of compassionate care, a lack of privacy, just poor experiences overall, when women and families sadly lose much-wanted pregnancies,” Ms Ockenden said.
“Interestingly in recent weeks staff have started to come forward to say they want to talk to me, because they are hearing about this and saying what women are saying is correct.
“One other thing I am raising with the trust is the timeliness of complaint responses, often it is not good enough.”
However, she says improvements have been made to staffing problems.
“For the first time in a very, very long time some midwives from out of area, more experienced midwives, are coming forward to join Nottingham,” she said.
“That is excellent news, because not only will there be a positive contribution to clinical care but more junior midwives on the ground, at the very start of their careers, will benefit from the support of those midwives.
“Having said that there has been a long history in Nottingham of staff feeling spoken down to, bullied, not able to raise concerns, and in the here and now we are still picking up concerns that staff don’t know how to escalate concerns.”
Last month the director of midwifery at NUH, Sharon Wallis, insisted work culture is changing after revealing none of the trust’s newly-qualified midwives has left over the past 15 months.
“We’ve just on-boarded 49 midwives over the past few weeks and we have interviews on November 9 for our remaining 20 full-time vacancies,” she said at a Nottingham City Council Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Committee in October.
“I can say we are getting midwives that work in other trusts coming to us because they have heard how good things are at NUH with the support staff get.
“We’ve not lost any of our band five newly-qualified midwives for well over 12 months.”
It was also noted there had been a reduction in incidents reported to the Maternity and Newborn Safety Investigations (MNSI) programme, which is part of a national strategy to improve maternity safety across the NHS in England.
Cases reported to MNSI now stand at five, compared to highs of 17 around three years ago.
