Baby deaths force end to NHS targets for natural births
The NHS has abandoned targets that encouraged hospitals to pursue “normal births”, over fears for the safety of mothers and babies.
Maternity units were told in a letter to stop using caesarean section rates to assess their performance. It comes after repeated scandals in maternity units, blamed in part on a focus on pursuing natural births at the expense of safety.
The letter from Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent, NHS England’s chief midwife, and Dr Matthew Jolly, the national clinical director for maternity, instructed “all maternity services to stop using total caesarean section rates as a means of performance management”.
It added: “We are concerned by the potential for services to pursue targets that may be clinically inappropriate and unsafe in individual cases."
A final report into the deaths of dozens of babies at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust will be published next month. It is expected to be highly critical.
The midwife leading the inquiry, Donna Ockenden, has said women “felt pressured to have a normal birth” at the trust, adding: “There was a multi-professional, not midwife-led, focus on normal birth pretty much at any cost.”
Hayley Coates, 29, lost her son Kaylan after staff at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust ignored her pleas for a caesarean section in March 2018. A coroner ruled that neglect contributed to Kaylan’s death. He suffered a fractured skull when he was delivered with forceps and was starved of oxygen.
Coates, a mother of three, said she welcomed the NHS England letter, adding: “I was just ignored when I asked multiple times for a caesarean section. I was told repeatedly: ‘You will have this baby naturally, you don’t want to go to theatre.’ If I had gone to theatre many hours before, my baby wouldn’t have died. They have a duty of care, and the mother’s wishes are supposed to be priority.”
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Source: The Times, 20 February 2022