\n<\/p>\n
The appointment of a national maternity commissioner would be \u201cfundamentally dangerous\u201d, a bereaved mother who founded a maternity safety campaign group has warned.<\/p>\n
Emily Barley, whose daughter Beatrice died because of failings at Barnsley hospital in 2022, told BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme that the recommendation for a maternity commissioner in England in the Amos review was \u201cnot going to do what we need to move maternity safety forwards\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ministers have bowed to growing pressure by agreeing to recruit the UK\u2019s first commissioner for maternity and neonatal care. Whoever takes on the role will pursue hospitals over persistent failures in care, ensure wide-ranging improvements are made and try to restore the faith of families in a maternity system in England that has been rocked by a series of scandals.<\/p>\n
James Murray, the health secretary, announced the move in response to Valerie Amos\u2019s government-commissioned inquiry of maternity care, which concluded it was a system characterised by poor care and a failure to listen to women, and was plagued by racism and discrimination.<\/p>\n
But Barley, who co-founded the Maternity Safety Alliance, said appointing a powerful maternity commissioner would be \u201cfundamentally dangerous\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cConcentrating all of the power and responsibility for turning around maternity services in the hands of one person is, in my view, just insane,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not achievable. It seems designed to me to grab headlines, but not to make the change that we need.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked what she thought should be changed and what would have prevented her situation, Barley said: \u201cNone of the things in this report would have prevented what happened to Beatrice, and what we\u2019re finding is this pattern of not being listened to, which Baroness Amos does highlight in her report, but we\u2019re finding now that even after our children have died, we\u2019re still not being listened to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barley also repeated her call for a public inquiry into maternity care failings.<\/p>\n
Responding to the criticism on BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme, Lady Amos said: \u201cThis is not about concentrating power in the hands of one person. It is about saying that you need an independent voice and advocate for women and families.\u201d<\/p>\n
In her report, Amos made eight main recommendations to improve care, including that:<\/p>\n
Maternity triage services \u2013 the childbirth equivalent of A&E \u2013 need an urgent overhaul, including more staff on duty, so that women\u2019s concerns are acted on more quickly.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Asked why women were not being listened to in NHS maternity services and how they could be protected when they were at their most vulnerable, Amos told BBC Breakfast: \u201cWe have to change the culture. We have to make sure that the staff who are looking after the women, that they understand how to deal with trauma.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to have cultures in our health services where people feel able to speak up, where they are able to say: \u2018look, something is going wrong here\u2019 and when somebody more senior is not able just to shut you down.<\/p>\n
Amos told the Today programme her \u201cpersonal view\u201d was that a statutory public inquiry was not needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cStatutory public inquiries take such a long time that the changes that I am proposing, which I would like to see start now, that this could have a transformational impact on the system, and we would not need a statutory public inquiry, but that is a personal view, and I absolutely understand why some families are calling for one,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The appointment of a national maternity commissioner would be \u201cfundamentally dangerous\u201d, a bereaved mother who founded a maternity safety campaign group has warned. Emily Barley, whose daughter Beatrice died because of failings at Barnsley hospital in 2022, told BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme that the recommendation for a maternity commissioner in England in the Amos<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[17281,5032,1903,311,24879,37,1398,4611,328,2272],"class_list":{"0":"post-50773","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-bereaved","9":"tag-commissioner","10":"tag-dangerous","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-fundamentally","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-maternity","15":"tag-mother","16":"tag-policy","17":"tag-role"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}