A Panorama programme airing this evening highlights the failures in maternity care at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. 

The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) has responded:

“Our heart goes out to the Nottingham families who lost babies and had terrible experiences of their care. We cannot let women and babies suffer avoidable harm in the future, and we have to see action from what happened there. The programme emphasised the need to listen to women, learn from errors and be willing to change practice, and this is absolutely right.  

“We heard in the programme from staff whistleblowers who warned that staffing was depleted, staff were exhausted, and the service ill-equipped, putting safety at risk. The Trust had miscalculated the number of midwives it needed and claimed it had no idea staffing levels were so unsafe. This isn’t just a risk in Nottingham, we’ve heard this from maternity staff across the country, and we urgently need safe staffing to provide safe care.”