A campaigning father whose daughter died in the Shrewsbury maternity scandal is calling for police prosecutions after 300 babies died or were left brain damaged due to poor care.
Richard Stanton says a number of health bodies are implicated in the obsession with natural births that cost so many lives at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals Trust (SaTH).
Tomorrow top midwife Donna Ockenden will deliver her final report in to what is considered by many the worst scandal in NHS history.
Botched births meant mothers and babies died and some newborns were left brain damaged - all while SaTH was being held up as an example of good practice due to its low caesarean rates.
Mothers were denied C-sections and forced to suffer traumatic births as many babies were left with fractured skulls and broken bones while others were starved of oxygen and suffered life changing brain injuries.
The Mirror understands between 250 and 400 test cases have now been passed to West Mercia Police which is conducting a parallel investigation which could lead to a corporate prosecution of the trust or individual prosecutions of senior medics.
Richard, whose daughter Kate Stanton-Davies died during birth in 2009, said: “This is a watershed moment for maternity care across the NHS.
“SaTH was a horrendous case but they were not an isolated trust. You only have to look in East Kent and Nottingham where hundreds more families are coming forward to express concern about the care they received.
“I hope the police will now have sufficient evidence to present to the CPS for a prosecution.
“SaTH should suspend senior managers who have been promoted or moved sideways. They have overseen the culture of normal births at all costs.”
Richard’s wife Rhiannon Davies gave birth in a midwife-led unit run by the Shrewsbury trust in March 2009 where there were no doctors. She remembers “the midwives encouraged us to go there to ‘keep their numbers up’”.
Rhiannon’s pregnancy was wrongly classed as low-risk and she should have given birth at a hospital where doctors were on hand.
Her baby, Kate Stanton-Davies, was “pale and floppy” when she was born.
She was airlifted to Birmingham’s Heartlands Hospital but died before her mother was able to get there.
Rhiannon and Richard were initially told there had been no problem with the care they had been given, and their first two complaints were dismissed by the trust.
The couple then embarked on a mission to discover how their daughter had died and found many others had gone through a similar experience.
A dossier compiled by Rhiannon and another bereaved mother Kayleigh Griffiths led to the Government commissioning the Ockenden review.
A five-year investigation by a team of 90 expert midwives and doctors examined the experiences of 1,500 families after a total of 1,800 complaints about births at the trust between 2000 and 2019.
At least 12 mothers died while giving birth, and some families lost more than one child, the report is expected to show.
The report will have implications for NHS England, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) - all of which pushed targets for natural births that have since been scrapped.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) and local clinical commissioning group (CCG) will also come under scrutiny for giving the trust a clean bill of health while a toxic culture among midwives was costing lives.
Richard said: “They all knew about the tragedy that was unfolding. They knew the mortality numbers were high and that there was a culture of denial.
“That had been flagged up to them. This was allowed to happen.
“The NMC was invested in the culture of ‘natural births’ and the others negated responsibility and passed it on to the next agency.
“I also think the NHS in general didn’t want another scandal after Mid-Staffs and Morcambe Bay.
“When this started growing with all the families coming forward I think it became insurmountable for people in senior positions at NHS England to actually comprehend what was happening.
“I want NHS England to have an independent person to scrutinise the Ockenden recommendations and make sure they are embedded. Otherwise I don’t fully trust that they will be followed through.”
The report will be unveiled at a briefing near Shrewsbury on Wednesday morning.
It is expected to say that instead of learning from baby deaths SaTH minimised or covered up its culpability.
Bereaved have mothers told investigators that midwives did not listen when they asked for a C-section and later felt blamed by the trust for the death of their baby.
