More than 150 baby deaths linked to U.K. maternity scandal: probe

Paramedics push a trolley next to a line of ambulances outside the Royal London Hospital in the Whitechapel area of east London, Thursday, Jan. 6, 2022.

More than 500 mothers and babies suffered potentially avoidable harm or died due to poor care at a U.K. hospital, according to a damning report published Wednesday, in the country’s latest maternity scandal.

At least 156 cases involved the death of babies and six mothers also died at two units run by Nottingham University Hospitals Trust in central England.

The independent probe was the largest maternity inquiry in the history of the state-run National Health Service (NHS) involving over 2,500 families in cases spanning 13 years from 2012-2025.

It comes after a string of other investigations in recent years highlighted a crisis in England’s care of mother and babies.

Sarah and Jack Hawkins’ daughter Harriet should have been born healthy, but was stillborn in 2016. The couple were both senior clinicians at the trust at the time.

“I just can’t compute ... how they did this to us and how they did this to all these families,” said Sarah Hawkins, a physiotherapist, after the report’s publication.

“Our concerns were dismissed and not acted upon. We weren’t told the truth about what happened, even after death,” added Jack Hawkins.

The former doctor at the trust said the findings marked the end of a “relentless and at times almost unbearable 10-year campaign” to learn the truth about the failings.

‘Toxic’

Report author senior midwife Donna Ockenden found a “bullying and toxic culture” at the trust’s two maternity hospitals “infected” by a “small minority of powerful leaders”.

She slammed baby Harriet’s “avoidable death” which was “compounded by a systemic cover-up and investigations designed to mislead”.

Of the babies who died there were 94 stillbirths and 62 cases in which babies died shortly after birth from a range of conditions including oxygen starvation and hospital-acquired infections, according to Ockenden.

The cases included Wynter Andrews whose parents were wrongly told in 2019 to terminate a healthy pregnancy.

Her father Gary Andrews said a clinician had told him that “if we listened to every mother’s concerns, we’d be overrun”.

“I think now I can respond to that and say if you’d listened to every mother’s concerns, there would be hundreds of mothers, babies, still alive,” he said.

In parliament, Health Minister James Murray described the report’s findings as “chilling” and said regulators had been more concerned about “protecting clinicians” than providing accountability.

He said he had been “appalled by the neglect, incompetence, racism, discrimination, contempt and harassment that so many suffered” and pledged an action plan by the end of the year.

Maternity care scandals have been exposed at a number of other hospital trusts including East Kent, Morecambe Bay, and Shrewsbury and Telford.