Two unvaccinated women died just weeks after giving birth at the same hospital, when they were both struck down with coronavirus.
The deaths at the end of last year, which are being treated as “serious incidents”, have been reported to the Royal Stoke University Hospital’s board.
One of the cases involved a new mum who died just 24 days after an emergency c-section at the Hartshill complex, StokeonTrentLive reports.
The mum was Covid positive and had not been vaccinated.
The other tragedy involved a second unvaccinated woman who died after catching Covid, a little more than two months after giving birth.
The woman was black and so potentially at greater risk of dying of Covid and, in response to this case, the hospital has revised its 'safety netting' advice to include increased risk factors, such as ethnicity.
It comes as latest figures show that 26.1 per cent of pregnant women using the hospital's maternity services are still unvaccinated - despite a high-profile public health campaign.
Director of midwifery Sarah Jamieson said: "Several actions have come out of this very tragic case, such as a Covid surveillance pathway for pregnant women who are Covid-positive, which includes the development of a triage service for those women."
Other actions include the implementation of an updated Covid care plan in obstetrics, and a new requirement that a consultant obstetrician reviews all pregnant or recently pregnant in-patients with suspected or confirmed Covid at least daily, the hospital said.
Last month the Mirror reported on a new study that revealed pregnant women who caught Covid were twice as likely to develop serious complications and three times more likely to suffer a potentially fatal blood clot.
Coronavirus also doubles the risk of of premature birth, acute respiratory distress syndrome and sepsis, according to new research by California-based care consortium Kaiser Permanente.
Meanwhile, in the UK, mums-to-be who have not had the jab make up a fifth of the most ill patients in intensive care, data showed.
Infected patients who took part in this latest study were three times as likely to have a blood clot - known medically as a thromboembolism, scientists discovered.
Thromboembolism can cause a blockage in the main artery of the lung or form elsewhere and become life threatening.
Overall, the coronavirus raised the risk of a severe maternal illness two-and-a-half times, researchers found.
