\n<\/p>\n
Women should not feel pressurised into experiencing an \u201cideal birth\u201d, the new health secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said, promising a root-and-branch reform of standards after several damning maternity scandals.<\/p>\n
Cooper, who returns to the department 27 years after she was the minister for public health under Tony Blair, said maternity and child health would be a major focus in the role, where she will also be expected to implement significant reforms to social care.<\/p>\n
In an interview with the Guardian, she said the culture change should address any pressure on women to have a particular kind of birth experience, after families have repeatedly raised the alarm about an unwillingness by some maternity units to escalate interventions because of a desire for more natural births.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would worry about any mum feeling pressurised that there is somehow a kind of an ideal birth experience to live up to when it\u2019s always different in every case, and you have to follow the evidence, you have to have informed choice,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In one of her first acts as health secretary, Cooper said she intended to re-introduce binding national maternity standards, which were dismantled under the early Conservative NHS reforms and replaced with fragmented trust-by-trust practices.<\/p>\n
The standards, to be drafted by a new maternity taskforce, would have five key aims. They include ending the postcode lottery for levels of care, and tackling racial inequalities that have meant worse outcomes for deprived areas, in particular for black and Asian women. They will also make patient experience part of the measurement of standards and have targets that will give early warning of underperformance before a major scandal develops.<\/p>\n
Cooper, who was the first minister to take maternity leave, as a junior health minister in the early 2000s, said she had found the reports of maternity scandals \u201ctraumatic\u201d to read and that it was clear systemic change was needed.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Yvette Cooper, right, in 2000, while public health minister, with the social security minister Angela Eagle.<\/span> Photograph: PA Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve always said the NHS is about the cradle to the grave. I want to make it a personal crusade to put the cradle back at the heart of the NHS, and to have much more focus around maternity and child health, the very beginning of a family\u2019s life, making that much more central to the priorities of the NHS, giving it the priority that it really deserves.\u201d<\/p>\n Cooper said that there had been discussions for the past two decades about how maternity services could better listen to mothers\u2019 needs. But she said on returning to the department, it felt clear that emphasis had been lost.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels incomprehensible that we could be in this situation in the 2020s. <\/em>I went back to look at some of the things that we\u2019d done 25 years ago. And what did strike me was how much we were talking then about women and families being at the centre of care and about listening to women\u2019s views.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is really shocking and distressing feeling that has somehow been lost in some of the maternity units where actually it should be the central issue. I had a direct interest. I was pregnant at the time. But I am really struck by it now, just feeling like there is this big gap in the priorities that the NHS has been focused on,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Cooper added she was determined to provide a robust response to the two major independent inquiries into maternity failings \u2013 Donna Ockenden\u2019s reports into major trust-level failures in Shrewsbury and Telford and at Nottingham, alongside Valerie Amos\u2019s national investigation into England\u2019s maternity system.<\/p>\n Both highlighted systemic clinical errors, understaffing and toxic institutional cultures, revealing that hundreds of infant and maternal deaths were directly attributable to a refusal to listen to mothers and a defensive impulse toward institutional cover-ups.<\/p>\n Amos\u2019s review, in particular, has faced significant backlash including the resignation of one expert adviser over the lack of explicit warnings about \u201cnormal birth ideology\u201d \u2013 and over Amos\u2019s central recommendation for a new statutory maternity commissioner, which families said would lack meaningful independence.<\/p>\n Cooper said she was committed to introducing a commissioner. \u201cIn the end, the most important people in the maternity services are the mothers, babies, the families. But the point of having a maternity commissioner is to make sure that those issues are championed as part of an NHS,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She said she was clear about the need to tackle an oppositional culture in some trusts between doctors and midwives \u2013 and how they approached levels of intervention in birth.<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that struck me most was the sense of women feeling they weren\u2019t being listened to \u2026 And I think that probably does go back to issues around culture,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Cooper, until recently foreign secretary, said she was prepared for a tough fight in the health role as she sought to implement Andy Burnham\u2019s social care reforms \u2013 saying she was committed to putting in place a national care service, announced by the prime minister last week.<\/p>\n <\/span>Yvette Cooper, who served as foreign secretary under Keir Starmer, arriving with the then prime minister for a Nato summit in Turkey in July.<\/span> Photograph: Alastair Grant\/Reuters<\/p>\n A longstanding ally of the former prime minister, Keir Starmer, and a former leadership rival of Burnham\u2019s in 2015, Cooper said she believed the change of prime minister had been necessary.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course it\u2019s not easy. I really did not think it was possible to win the election when I came back into the shadow cabinet in 2022. It\u2019s only because of what Keir did that we managed to win.<\/p>\n \u201cBut we had very difficult local election results \u2026 we have to respond to that. But I think we\u2019ve got a sense of energy now.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of the things that Andy wants to focus on and drive are also just very much the things that that people are concerned about across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Women should not feel pressurised into experiencing an \u201cideal birth\u201d, the new health secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said, promising a root-and-branch reform of standards after several damning maternity scandals. Cooper, who returns to the department 27 years after she was the minister for public health under Tony Blair, said maternity and child health would be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[5189,1847,335,178,17493,4785,418,5720],"class_list":{"0":"post-51627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-birth","9":"tag-cooper","10":"tag-feel","11":"tag-hospitals","12":"tag-ideal","13":"tag-pressure","14":"tag-women","15":"tag-yvette"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51627","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=51627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}