20 NEWS Talking points
THE WEEK 9 April 2022
Kate Stanton-Davies should have
celebrated her 13th birthday this month,
said Harriet Walker in The Times. Instead,
her parents marked the 13th anniversary
of her death, just six hours after her birth
at a midwife-led maternity unit in the
Shropshire town of Ludlow. She had
suffered haemorrhages in the womb,
which had left her anaemic. In the
last weeks of pregnancy, her mother,
Rhiannon Davies, had noticed that her
movements were slowing and flagged
it up, but rather than being directed to
a specialist hospital, she was told that
she had a “lazy baby”. Kate was born
floppy and unable to suckle following a
traumatic labour – but again, the warning
signs were not heeded. She was left unattended in an unheated cot
while her mother was sent away to wash. By the time Davies came
back, the baby was unresponsive and staff had moved into crisis
mode. Kate was airlifted to a neonatal unit in a helicopter. But her
parents were not allowed to travel with her; they struggled even
to find out to which hospital she was being taken. By the time
Davies got to the hospital, in Birmingham, her baby was dead.
“Apparently I was screaming,” she says. “When I reached Kate,
I grabbed her and didn’t let go.”
Within 24 hours, Davies and her
husband had started to ask questions.
Last week, they finally got answers, said
Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, when
senior midwife Donna Ockenden
published the results of her public
inquiry into the failure of maternity services at Shrewsbury and
Telford Hospital Trust. Her “harrowing” report concluded that
over 20 years, 201 babies and nine mothers died who could have
lived with better care. Their stories are devastating: the unnamed
woman who had been anxious about the risks associated with
having a vaginal delivery following a C-section, but who was
pressed to go ahead and died on the operating table; or Kayleigh
Griffiths, who made repeated frantic calls to midwifery services
after her baby Pippa stopped feeding and vomited mucus in 2016.
Pippa died of meningitis at 31 hours. Other mothers experienced
horrific injuries during labour; 94 babies suffered brain damage.
Poor training, staff shortages and weak management were cited as
contributory factors, said The Guardian. In particular, Ockenden
found that a “them and us” culture between midwives and
doctors had led to an unwillingness to escalate cases, and
contributed to multiple errors. Such failures were “compounded
by a deadly unwillingness to admit
mistakes”. Staff weren’t just incompetent,
said Alys Denby on CapX – they were
cruel. Parents repeatedly told Ockenden
about the lack of kindness and
compassion they had been shown, even
when their babies had died. “Instead of
apologies, they were given excuses, and
false information.” Mothers were blamed
for their babies’ injuries and deaths; some
were even blamed for their own deaths.
“This culture of arrogance and neglect
had persisted for 20 years,” said The
Independent, and would have carried
on had Rhiannon Davies and Kayleigh
Griffiths not joined forces in 2016 and
bravely fought for an independent inquiry.It’s shocking to consider how many lives might have been saved
had the Trust admitted its failings and learnt from them, said
Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. But what is worse is that this
was not even the NHS’s first maternity scandal. In 2015, the
Morecambe Bay Inquiry looked into similar failures and came to
similar conclusions. We’re told “never again”, but will this be the
last maternity scandal? Ockenden put forward various national
recommendations, including better training and safer staffing
levels, but there is also a culture that
needs to be addressed: the preoccupation
with “natural births”, which started as a
movement against highly medicalised
labour in the 1970s, but which has since
swung too far in the other direction.Mothers now come under intense pressure to have a drug-free,
doctor-free labour, said Rosie Kinchen in The Sunday Times. It’s
a pressure applied by the NHS (the Shrewsbury and Telford Trust
had been commended for its low rate of C-sections); but it’s also
a belief system that mothers and health professionals have
internalised. As a society, we seek technological fixes wherever we
can, yet women who opt for pain relief during labour are made to
feel they’ve failed, while those who ask for C-sections are derided
as “too posh to push”. It’s a dangerous theology, said Matthew
Syed in the same paper; and it’s not the only one. We have turned
the NHS into a quasi religion – a “world-beating” organisation
staffed by “heroes” and “angels”. We are urged us to “protect the
NHS”, not the other way around, which actually reflects the view
of many managers: that the institution matters more than its
patients. How else to explain the appalling treatment of NHS
whistleblowers? There will be no meaningful reform while we
continue to regard the NHS, and its staff, as beyond reproach.The maternity scandal: a shocking litany of failure
“By the time Davies came back, the
baby was unresponsive and the staff
had moved into crisis mode”Rhiannon Davies and her daughter KateChris Rock was praised for his
calm reaction to Will Smith’s
slap at the Oscars. In The
Guardian, Ed Byrne recalls that
he was less composed when
faced with a difficult crowd at
a financial services awards.
“I was dying on my hole and
I said: ‘Look, I’m just going to
go because either I’m a terrible
comedian or you’re a terrible
audience. I’ve been a comedian
for 20 years, how long have
you been an audience?’ And Iwalked off. Then the organiser
goes: ‘Well, now you have to
do the charity auction.’”The late Karl Lagerfeld was so
devoted to his cat Choupette,
he left her a share of his $200m
estate. But his friend Carine
Roitfeld, ex-editor of French
Vogue, was rather less besotted.
“She’s a very mean cat,
actually,” she told The Daily
Telegraph. “She bites. And
she’s fine. She lives in a big
apartment with her own maid.”Vladimir Putin is so anxious
about his health he travels with
up to nine medics, and has
been visited by a thyroid
cancer specialist 35 times in
four years, according to Proekt,
a Russian investigative site. He
has also been known to bathein blood extracted from deer’s
antlers – a traditional practice
which is said to strengthen
bones, cure ailments and boost
men’s potency.Stephen Merchant is a Bruce
Springsteen fan – but he didn’t
relish having to carry him at a
concert. The Boss had decided
to crowd-surf. Merchant, at the
front, braced himself to receive
him, “but I forget that I’m 6ft
7ins. And the person behind
me is, like, regular height and
they can’t reach him.” Merchant
was left holding Springsteen’s
full weight. “He’s a small man
but he’s a lot heavier than you
think. He’s dense with talent.”Pick of the week’s