Hospitals forced to repay millions after falsely claiming their maternity units were safe

NHS hospitals have been forced to pay millions of pounds to regulators after wrongly claiming their maternity units were among the safest in the country.

Seven NHS trusts, including some now at the centre of major care scandals, will have to pay back a total of £8.5m after self-assessments of their maternity services were found to be false.

Families whose babies died as a result of avoidable errors at some of the hospitals told The Independent it was further evidence of poor governance and management failings.

NHS Resolution, which acts as the health service’s insurer for clinical negligence, launched the maternity incentive scheme in 2018 in an effort to focus action on 10 key safety areas in maternity, including ensuring they have systems in place to review deaths, monitor women and plan staffing levels as well as reporting incidents to the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch which investigates maternity incidents in the NHS.

Among the trusts forced to give money back over the first two years of the scheme include Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust, which paid back £953,000. An inquiry into its maternity service found a dozen women and more than 40 babies died as a result of poor care in one of the largest maternity scandals in NHS history.

East Kent Hospitals University Trust, which is facing an inquiry into baby deaths and a criminal prosecution by the Care Quality Commission over the death of baby Harry Richford in 2017, face paying back £2.1m over two years.

Derek Richford, who helped expose failings at East Kent after the death of his grandson, told The Independent it was “abhorrent” that the trust claimed “vital NHS funds by falsely claiming that they had achieved 10/10 for maternity safety when the truth was in fact 6/10. East Kent Trust did this two years running and even when asked to check their submission, reconfirmed the erroneous data to NHS Resolution.”

An evaluation of the scheme by NHS Resolution said it was “recognised that recent examples of poor governance from trusts in relation to the certification of submissions require further action”.

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Source: The Independent, 7 March 2021