One in five births sees a maternity care mistake being made

Over the last two years, 276,767 incidents regarding maternity care were recorded by hospital staff in England. This is the equivalent of one incident for every five births.

The majority of errors were minor, however nearly a quarter of them resulted in harm to either mother or baby. 288 incidents resulted in a death.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said that although these statistics are shocking and require immediate improvement, it is good to see that hospitals were being honest as it should reduce the number of repeat incidents.

The errors recorded varied from minor delays in giving medication to life-threatening complications going undiagnosed.

Out of over 63,000 cases of recorded harm, almost 55,000 resulted in injuries or illnesses that required only a basic level of first aid.

8,134 cases resulted in substantial harm, and 479 cases led to severe harm – for example, an irreversible disability.

There were 288 deaths recorded.

A fifth of the incidents were caused by errors regarding patient admission, transfer or discharge.

Meanwhile a third of the incidents were caused by errors made regarding treatment or procedures.

Earlier on in the year, the government set up the Healthcare Safety Investigations Branch (HSIB) whose role is to investigate every case of severe harm and death. The government has also set an aim of reducing the number of stillbirths, deaths and baby brain injuries by half by 2025.

Amanda Cavanagh, a Medical Negligence Specialist at Ashtons Legal, says: “Midwives do an amazing job, as do most of the NHS staff. However, without increasing numbers of staff on the ground to manage even normal deliveries, the more difficult and problematic birth injuries will keep occurring. It’s all very well for the government to set up agencies to “investigate and learn” from these incidents, but frankly we need more midwives. Perhaps the first step would be to reintroduce the bursary for training midwives which they removed last year. Maybe then more people would want to train in this worthwhile career.”