Staff at a hospital trust whose poor maternity care was dubbed “scandalous” following a New Statesman and Channel 4 News investigation are being advised to downplay press reports of bad care if concerns are raised by worried mothers.
Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (OUH) is being examined as part of a “rapid review” of 12 maternity units – a review process that is itself part of the government’s ongoing investigation of maternity and neonatal services in England, led by the Labour peer Valerie Amos. The trust is also under scrutiny from NHS England following our report, which was published on 5 November.
A letter, seen by the New Statesman, has been sent to staff at OUH, offering advice on how to respond to women who express concern over the trust’s inclusion in the review, as well as over “media coverage” of its maternity care.
The Word document we have seen (“OUH Maternity – National Maternity Review”) is not dated but appears to have been circulated in early November, just before the publication of the New Statesman’s investigation into OUH maternity services. The letter says: “We are expecting the [Amos] investigation team to be on site 6 and 7 November and to return next week. There has, and will continue to be, media coverage around Oxfordshire maternity care specifically, and we anticipate that this will cause heightened anxiety for our pregnant women/birthing people and their families.”
The letter reminds staff of the trust’s official response to being included in the national maternity investigation, and then suggests a blog post staff may wish to share with “people you care for who are affected by… media coverage”. The post, written by the former midwife Dr Sara Wickham on 24 October is titled “Why you shouldn’t believe everything you read about childbirth in the papers”. Its full contents are shared in the letter and tells women to bear in mind that media reports are motivated by “getting maximum publicity” and “sometimes achieved by taking a sensationalist stance”. The post also claims that, in some media reporting of maternity, “key facts are glossed over, shared in a misleading way or left out completely”. “Risk and fear sell news very quickly,” it adds. “Stay calm. Remember that the job of the media is to sell headlines, not to help people making pregnancy and birth decisions. Breathe.”
The letter has also been shared with staff at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, which is responsible for delivering community and mental health services across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and further afield. The trust provides the area’s Infant-Parent Perinatal Service (IPPS), which offers support to parents who are experiencing or at risk of pregnancy or baby-related mental health difficulties. One mother, Annabelle (not her real name) was sent the letter after telling the IPPS team that reading the New Statesman investigation made her realise that her traumatic experience of giving birth had not been an “isolated case”.
“I mentioned that it made me more scared and upset about what could have happened. And they said, ‘Oh well, we’ve got this email that’s been sent to all of us on how to communicate with the patients. If you’re interested, we can send you this because you may find it helpful.’” Annabelle recalls telling the mental health professional that she felt “lucky” – both she and her children were fine – but that if she hadn’t been, she had “no trust that I would have professionals looking after me”.
When we spoke, Annabelle laughed – somewhat bitterly – about the letter. But she says she could not quite believe that health professionals would think the kind of approach the email recommended would be helpful to anyone after a traumatic birth. “Maybe they haven’t really read this, because I’m sure if they had, they would not have forwarded it to me,” she said. “How can someone read it and think, ‘That’s what our patients really want to hear’?” Annabelle interpreted the letter as suggesting that OUH maternity problems were down to the “evil media” and nothing else. “It’s totally defensive,” she said. “I would expect that the response would be something like, ‘We are taking these measures, we are making things safer, we’re working on it,’ and instead it’s saying, ‘Don’t trust the headlines and breathe.’ How is this helpful?”
Annabelle says she is “lucky”; she has a lot of support, as well as private care which she and her husband paid to avoid lengthy waits for NHS help. But, she tells me, “if someone is actually still traumatised and reading this, they will feel pretty bad”.
It is not known who was behind this letter, how widely it has been circulated among staff, or how many patients it has been shared with. A spokesperson for Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, whose staff member sent the document to Annabelle, said the organisation did “not recognise and are not aware of the origin of this letter”, nor had it received any “official correspondence from Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust asking us to distribute this letter on their behalf”. The spokesperson added: “We will look into the circumstances surrounding the correspondence and will continue to support families who use our mental health services.” The trust did not respond to questions asking if its leaders thought this was an appropriate way to respond to women voicing legitimate concerns over Oxfordshire maternity care.
The OUH’s interim CEO, Simon Crowther, said it could also not identify where the letter came from. “The message shared with us by the New Statesman is not a message we recognise and we do not know its origin,” he said. “Its reference to an external blog is neither in keeping with our core approach as an organisation, nor a view we support,” he continued. “We agree that this reference is unhelpful for women and families – particularly those facing trauma, and it is also unhelpful for staff.” The CEO said he was “grateful” to be able to set the record straight and wanted to reiterate OUH’s “fundamental commitment to listening, openness and transparency”.
In November, when contacted by the New Statesman as part of our investigation, the trust extended an apology to “any family who have not received the standard of care they deserve” and did not challenge the personal stories we reported.
[Further reading: Britain’s next maternity scandal]
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