Everyone connected with maternity care will know what a difficult task it has been to read the final Ockenden Report on the findings, conclusions, and essential actions from the independent review of maternity services at The Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust – none more so than the women and families who have received maternity care in the past or will do so in the future.
As a specialist Trust for women and babies, we have carefully taken some time to reflect on the contents of the report before providing our initial response.
We know that anyone who has received or is currently receiving maternity care – at Liverpool Women’s and elsewhere – will have found reading this report particularly difficult. We would like to say that we are here for you and we will support you if you have any worries or concerns.
Firstly, we would like to extend our thanks to everyone involved in enabling this final report to be published. We thank Donna Ockenden for leading the review but most importantly we thank the families who showed extreme bravery in sharing their experiences and whose contribution will help improve the safety of maternity services in the future.
At Liverpool Women’s we pride ourselves on being an open and transparent Trust which prioritises the safety of the people we care for. We always try to do the right thing and every decision we make is in the interests of our women, babies and their families.
We also acknowledge that we don’t always get things right and we are taking the time to reflect on the report in full to understand what we can do to provide even better, safer and more excellent maternity services in the future.
Therefore, we welcome the 15 essential actions for maternity providers that are included in the report. As part of this initial response we would like to briefly explain what we are already doing against the essential actions and what we will focus on as immediate priorities to deliver against the actions in full over the coming weeks and months:
- We encourage you to be involved in decisions about your care during your pregnancy, labour and birth and support you to make these decisions
- We have launched an electronic notes system that can be accessed using your phone; we are using your feedback to shape the development of this
- We continue to work closely with the Liverpool Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP) and other community groups to ensure we act on feedback from families who use our maternity services
- We are committed to ensuring that we hear the voices of those who are often less heard, so that we can adapt our services to meet their needs
- We continue to expand our staff group – including midwives, support staff, obstetricians, anaesthetists and the neonatal team
- We provide twice daily consultant-led multidisciplinary ward rounds on Delivery Suite and are working towards 24/7 consultant presence
- We have practice educator facilitators and a preceptorship programme to ensure that our students and newly qualified midwives are supported in their roles
- We have a Maternity Education Team who provide high quality multidisciplinary team training; we recognise that staff who work together should train together
- We have a Fetal Monitoring Lead Midwife and Lead Obstetrician, who ensure that we follow best practice when monitoring your baby’s heartbeat during pregnancy and labour
- We will shortly launch as one of three Maternal Medicine Centres within the North West, ensuring that women with complex medical conditions in pregnancy have access to specialist care when needed
- We have a research-active Preterm Birth Clinic, which aims to reduce the risk of your baby being born too soon
- We have a Level 3 Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, which looks after babies who require the highest level of care within the region
- We have a Bereavement Team who provide compassionate, individualised, high quality bereavement care to families that sadly experience a miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death
- We have robust processes in place to investigate incidents and we encourage the involvement of independent experts when required
- We are working with other hospitals across the region to ensure that lessons are learnt and shared
This will be an ongoing journey for all of us. We will be working and closely engaging with our staff, women, families, and partner organisations to make sure that we achieve and deliver on the essential actions in full. We will do this together through collaboration, learning and most importantly by listening to the women and families we care for.
We will be providing regular updates to show progress against the essential actions in full and this will be shared publicly in due course.
If you are receiving maternity care at Liverpool Women’s or have done so in the past and you are affected by anything you have read in the published report, please get in touch with us via our Patient Experience Team by calling 0151 702 4353 or email pals@lwh.nhs.uk and we will support you as much as we can.
Our Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP) will also be closely involved with shaping our response to the Ockenden Report and they are on hand to connect with anyone who is receiving maternity care who would like to share details about their experiences. Our local MVP can be contacted directly at mvp.liverpool.voices@gmail.com.
Please follow this link to read the Ockenden Report in full: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1064302/Final-Ockenden-Report-web-accessible.pdf