A Conservative MP has spoken out about the difficulty she faced in tackling the NHS maternity scandal.

Lucy Allan’s comments come in the wake of the Ockenden Report which concluded repeated failures at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust led to the deaths of hundreds of babies.

Speaking to GB News she said: “There was an institutional blindness, it was normalising poor care rather than identifying a learning opportunity whereby what went wrong and how can we do it better next time. It was normalised as that is what happens during childbirth and what do you expect?

“It was minimising it, because whilst we were having meetings more cases were happening. More deaths were happening. If you look at the Ockenden review, you can see throughout the timeline that 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018…this was going on. The MPs that were there to hold these to account were not being given any information about these occurrences.”
“It does ask a very pertinent question, who is it that should be holding the NHS to account? Because it seems to me from this experience and from other aspects that the NHS is unaccountable and we will run our business how we choose to, we’re not accountable to patients, to MPs and not even accountable to ministers who might lose funding but they can’t make decisions. That is a very serious failing within the NHS.”
Her comments followed a report which saw a law firm say it has now been approached by more than 50 people following the Ockenden Report.

Beth Heath from Lanyon Bowdler LLP said many families still had unanswered questions.

The inquiry, led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, was first launched in 2017 to examine a cluster of 23 cases, but was expanded to look at almost 1,600 concerns over care over two decades.

It found catastrophic failures at the hospital trust may have led to the deaths of 201 babies and nine mothers, with other babies left with serious injuries.

Among its key findings were that there was a culture where mistakes were not investigated, parents were not listened to and the trust failed to learn from its mistakes.