Britain's postcode lottery for newborn deaths: Mortality rates on NHS wards twice as high in some areas, reveals report

Sick newborns in some areas of the UK are dying at twice the rate of seriously ill babies in other areas, a new report has revealed.

The findings raise serious questions about the quality of care in some neonatal units, with experts warning action needs to be taken to tackle the “striking variation”.

Across the country neonatal units are also short of at least 600 nurses with four in five failing to meet required safe staffing levels for specialist nurses.

The regions with the highest mortality rate at 10 per cent were Staffordshire, Shropshire and the Black Country, where 107 babies died. This compared with a rate of 5 per cent in north central and northeast London. The Shropshire region includes the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals Trust, which is at the centre of the largest maternity scandal in the history of the NHS, with hundreds of alleged cases of poor care now under investigation.

Dr Sam Oddie, a consultant neonatologist at Bradford Teaching Hospitals Trust and who led the work for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the differences in death rates between units.

“The mortality differences are very striking, with some units having a mortality rate twice that of the lowest. This variation in mortality is a basis for action by neonatal networks to ensure they are doing everything they can to make sure their mortality is as low as possible,” he said.

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Source: The Independent, 18 December 2019