By Anna Whittaker, Local Democracy Reporter
Two specialist investigators have been hired by Nottingham University Hospitals Trust to look at serious incidents within its maternity units.
Maternity bosses at the trust said the new process for dealing with Serious Incidents will mean it can investigate them more quickly.
Serious Incidents are unexpected or unintended events that could cause NHS patients harm.
Last year, the Local Democracy Reporting Service revealed the trust had not cleared 61 serious incident investigations, one of which dated back to 2019. These incidents have all now been investigated.
Maternity services at the trust, which runs the Queen’s Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital, have been rated inadequate by health watchdogs.
Rebecca Gray, Head of Midwifery, said the trust has since hired two investigators – one with a background in aviation and another who has worked in missing person investigations.
The comments were made at the trust’s board meeting on July 13.
Previously, a panel made up of trust clinicians would investigate the incidents alongside their usual workload.
Ms Gray said the organisation has “established a refined process for managing serious incidents” meaning SIs can be responded to in a “much more contemporary manner”.
She said: “We have gone out to recruitment for two maternity investigations to support that.
“We were successful in recruiting two strong candidates, one with an aviation investigation background and another who has a background working with missing person investigations.
“They are good skills to bring into the trust. All serious incidents prior to September 2022 have now been closed.”
She said two cases are with HSIB (Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch) in the “early stages of investigation”.
HSIB investigate maternal deaths, neonatal deaths, stillbirths, or severe brain injury in babies.
She added: “At the moment we have 20 open Serious Incidents which is a significant reduction from where we were previously.”
She said no Serious Incidents were recorded in June and one was recorded in May.
Rupert Egginton, Deputy Chief Executive, added: “We have had a challenging week on maternity and there is difficult news around.
“The fact that you’re relentlessly pursuing improvement is a credit to the whole team.”
Chief Executive Anthony May asked: “Given where we were with an unacceptably high backlog – are you assured that the new system is sustainable and will be able to hold Serious Incidents at a modest level?”
Ms Gray said: “The simple answer is yes, I think this will be much more sustainable.
“Previously the way we ran Serious Incident investigations was to establish a panel made up of clinical colleagues who worked their normal workload and Serious Incident investigations on top of that.
“They are expected to lead interviews, write the report and do the analysis.
“I think that’s not necessarily within the skillset of all our clinicians.
“Using specialist investigators who do have that background in evidence gathering, they will do the analysis. They will go to our clinical colleagues for expert reviews.
“This will reduce the burden across our clinical workflow.
“The work we’ve done to date with this methodology has proved that the quality of our investigations has increased.
“I think now we’ve got additional investigator resources it will be much more sustainable.”
