New maternity investigation to look at 10 ‘worst services'
A new maternity investigation is set to focus on the 10 'worst performing' maternity services in England.
Leeds and Sussex maternity services will be examined as part of the investigation, officials confirmed after Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced a national investigation into maternity services.
There have been a series of maternity scandals in recent years, with official reviews launched into a number of services including those in Nottingham; East Kent; Shrewsbury and Telford and Morecambe Bay.
Officials said these independent reviews found similar failings in compassionate care – including the failure to listen to women, concerns over safety and issues with leadership and culture.
Bereaved families in other areas have also called for their own inquiries, including families in Sussex, Leeds and Oxford.
The Department of Health and Social Care said the new investigation will consist of two parts.
The first will investigate up to 10 of the most concerning maternity and neonatal units, including Sussex, in the coming weeks to give affected families answers as quickly as possible, according to the Department of Health.
The second will be a 'system-wide' look at maternity and neonatal care, uniting lessons from past maternity inquiries to create one clear set of actions designed to improve national NHS care.
Officials have confirmed there will be local reviews into services in Leeds and Sussex, with the other areas to be confirmed 'shortly'.
The Department of Health and Social Care said that during the next month NHS England chief executive Sir Jim Mackey and chief nursing officer Duncan Burton will meet the trusts of greatest concern, including Leeds, Gloucester, Mid and South Essex and Sussex.
It is expected that during these meetings the top NHS officials will 'hold them to account for improvement'.
📢 National maternity and neonatal investigation to be launched
Too many families have suffered preventable harm.
The investigation will urgently look at services with specific issues and the entire maternity system, making sure each family receives safe and compassionate care. pic.twitter.com/J8XkwGM9dN
— Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk) June 23, 2025
Wes Streeting said he would be looking at individual cases of families in Leeds and Sussex who suffered from NHS failures.
Speaking at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists conference in London, he said: 'We'll bring in a package of measures to start taking action now, increasing accountability across the board, and bringing in the cultural change we need to see.
'Within the next month, the NHS chief executive, Jim Mackey, and the chief nursing officer, Duncan Burton, will meet the trusts of greatest concern, including Leeds, Gloucester, Mid and South Essex and Sussex, to hold them to account for improvement.'
He added: 'I'm currently discussing with Leeds families the best way to grip the challenges brought to light in that trust by their campaigning, reports in the media and the latest CQC report, and I'll be ordering an investigation into nine specific cases identified by families in Sussex who are owed a thorough account of what happened in those cases.'
A spokesperson for Families Failed by OUH Maternity Services – a campaign calling for an investigation into maternity services at Oxford University Hospitals – said: 'We are pleased to see Wes Streeting launch a national investigation into maternity services – it is vital and long overdue.
'We urge him to include Oxford University Hospitals Trust as one of the 10 units.
'Over 500 Oxfordshire families who have suffered serious harm in the care of OUH maternity services have joined together to raise awareness of the devastating failures happening in the trust – highlighting the need for an investigation.'
The NHS paid out £2.8 billion in compensation last year, with 41% of all payouts related to maternity care, according to data obtained by the Liberal Democrats from the House of Commons Library which was published earlier this year.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Royal Sources Claim Kate Middleton Will "Dramatically Scale Back" Her Responsibilities After "Wake-Up Call" Over Skipping Royal Ascot
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. On June 18, Kate Middleton suddenly canceled a planned appearance at Royal Ascot, with sources claiming the Princess of Wales was "disappointed" to miss the event. Royal experts suggested Prince William would "feel the void" at Royal Ascot without his wife, but royal aides subsequently claimed that Kate's absence was "no cause for alarm." Now, the Daily Beast is reporting that Princess Kate's decision to skip Ascot was indicative of more serious issues. "The last few years have been horrific," a former Royal Family staff member told the outlet. "[T]he relentless speculation about her and William, Queen [Elizabeth]'s death, The King's diagnosis which had them both thinking they were going to have to take over and then her own cancer diagnosis and treatment." Unsurprisingly, the challenges Princess Kate has been dealing with have "taken [their] toll." Luckily, the Prince of Wales is standing by to "fight tooth and nail to see she is given" extra "time to recover," should she need it, per the former staff member. The former royal staff member elaborated, telling the Daily Beast, "Kate is recalibrating her entire life, her entire work-life balance. Wednesday was a wake-up call, not a one-off. She has never found the public appearances, and the forensic attention and criticism that goes with them, at all easy to deal with, and it was just too much this week." As a result of Kate's Royal Ascot cancellation, and the ensuing public reaction, experts believe the Princess of Wales will retreat from public life, to some extent. According to the Daily Beast, royal sources told the outlet "they expected Kate to dramatically scale back her public appearances for the rest of the year and instead increase her online and digital footprint, remotely supporting causes close to her heart." Essentially, Kate's health, following her cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy treatment, is more important than anything else. "Kate will take it much easier for the rest of the year," one source alleged to the outlet. "I'd be surprised if you see her more than three times in the next three months."
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
How AI could save the broken NHS
Illustrations by Andreion De Castro You might be frustrated by your recent run-in with a customer service bot but when it comes to healthcare, there's good reason to suggest that a wave of new AI tools could represent hope for our creaking health service, slashing backlogs and catching diseases years or even decades earlier, lengthening lives in the process. This doesn't mean that your GP or consultant will soon be replaced by a silicon droid; the human element of healthcare will still be very much present. But, behind the scenes, AI is slowly beginning to reveal its prowess. Last month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced that a new AI-powered blood test to detect cancer will be trialled on the NHS. Called miONCO-Dx, it can detect early warning signs of 12 of the most lethal cancers through identifying worrying traces of tiny molecules called microRNAs, which can change the activity of genes. Proponents of AI's uses in healthcare often describe these tools as either 'a second set of eyes' or 'augmenting what a human doctor can do,' with Colin Rees, Professor of Gastroenterology at Newcastle University saying that he's enormously optimistic about their potential to limit preventable deaths. 'I think AI is going to transform healthcare like almost nothing else ever,' he says. 'Just in diagnostics, it's able to spot new patterns, look at blood tests and scans with a fresh perspective and, of course, it doesn't get tired or make mistakes.' Already, AI is beginning to make a difference in disease-prevention for a broad range of conditions, from early detection of osteoporosis to helping overstretched radiologists prioritise which patients to examine first. Let's take a closer look at what's happening right now, how technology may affect different diseases and common conditions, and what's likely to come later down the line. Since early 2022, a growing number of NHS Trusts across the UK have been using tools developed by a company called to accelerate analysis of the many millions of chest X-rays taken every year. With the UK currently suffering from a chronic shortage of radiologists – the latest data suggests that the NHS has 30 per cent fewer radiologists than it requires – AI has been trying to pick up the slack. In particular, according to CEO and co-founder Dr Aengus Tran, one of the goals has been to slash the time taken to diagnose cases of lung cancer – one of the most common cancers in the UK. 'The NHS has procured our AI across 131 hospitals to essentially run our system over chest X-rays, to see if the AI can find signs of cancer; perhaps subtle signs which might have been missed,' says Dr Tran. 'And if that's the case, those patients will be escalated to the very top of the list.' The early signs are promising. Data collected from NHS Grampian, in Scotland, suggests that the tool has increased the proportion of lung cancers identified at earlier stages by nearly a third, and the technology is now taking on an even wider remit. Because tools are capable of diagnosing more than 130 different lung-related conditions, from rib fractures to pneumonia to an enlarged heart, some NHS hospitals are already using them to work through their backlog of uninterpreted scans and help prioritise the most urgent cases. 'It means that patients with life-threatening illness and critical conditions are being seen sooner,' says Dr Tran. 'So, for example, in [hospitals in] Manchester, we're seeing that cases of pneumothorax [a collapsed lung] get flagged within less than a day, whereas previously that would have taken five or more days to get to.' More than 1.5 million people in the UK have atrial fibrillation, a condition characterised by sporadic bursts of an irregular heartbeat. This can have serious long-term consequences, as blood can begin to collect within the heart, forming clots which can then travel to the brain. As a result, people with atrial fibrillation are also more at risk of suffering a stroke. The problem, according to Rameen Shakur, a clinical cardiologist and Professor of Genomics & Precision Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Brighton, is that many of these cases go undetected (an estimated 270,000 people in the UK have undiagnosed atrial fibrillation) because patients do not always present with symptoms when being examined in hospital. To address this, Prof Shakur created a company called Cambridge Heartwear, which has designed a wearable monitor called Heartsense that records patient's heart rhythms to medical grade standard and checks for signs of atrial fibrillation using inbuilt AI algorithms. The device has since been tested in a clinical trial at a NHS hospital in Worthing, and Prof Shakur is hopeful that it can help to prevent some of the 100,000 strokes that occur each year in the UK alone. 'Once you find out that someone has atrial fibrillation, they can be prescribed anticoagulants [blood thinners] to reduce stroke risk, but that treatment is wholly dependent on catching it and getting a diagnosis,' he says. 'The advantage of this device is that it's discrete and malleable enough that you don't feel it. You can wear it while you're having a shower, when you're sleeping, when you're running to catch a bus – all times when an episode of atrial fibrillation might occur.' Earlier this year, the NHS began offering biennial bowel screening to all people aged between 50 and 74, with the aim of detecting and preventing more cases of bowel cancer. According to Prof Rees, the health service now carries out around 700,000 colonoscopy examinations – where a person's bowel is examined using a small camera – every year. As well as scanning for tumours, one of the aims of this procedure is to identify tiny precancerous warts called polyps, and remove them before they develop into anything more sinister. However, spotting polyps is not always straightforward. 'It requires a lot of concentration,' says Prof Rees. 'The bowel has got lots of folds in it, the large bowel is about a metre long and it has lots of blind spots. And there's very good evidence that missing these things leads to more patients developing cancer.' To address this issue, Prof Rees recently led a pioneering trial in which gastroenterologists carrying out colonoscopies were given the additional assistance of an AI tool called GI Genius, which had been trained to spot abnormalities within the bowel using powerful neural networks. 'It scans the image which the specialist is looking at on a screen through their scope,' says Prof Rees. 'If it spots an abnormality, it flags it and puts a green box around it. I think of it as being a little bit like spellcheck in Microsoft Word.' The trial, which involved more than 2,000 patients across 10 NHS Trusts, was successful: 30 per cent more polyps were detected, particularly a form of polyp which is quite notoriously difficult to spot via the naked eye alone. 'We call them sessile serrated polyps,' says Prof Rees. 'They're smaller, flatter polyps but they account for 30 per cent of bowel cancers, so they're particularly dangerous, and we found a significant increase in the detection of these bad guys.' For many people in their 50s, a twinge of back pain might be dismissed as a sign of encroaching old age, but, in some cases, it could be a spinal fracture, which represents an early warning sign of degenerative bone disease. When detected early, osteoporosis – a condition which causes the bones to become weaker and more fragile – is highly treatable. Now a new collaboration between academics, doctors, Royal Osteoporosis Society and the company is investigating whether the company's technology can pinpoint potentially tell-tale fracture signs. It could mean that, in future, whenever people in their 50s or 60s receive a CT scan, it will automatically be fed through AI technology to check for hints of osteoporosis. Can Google help prevent one of the most common causes of blindness? An ongoing partnership between Google Health, AI company DeepMind and Moorfields Eye Hospital is attempting to achieve just that through an AI system that aims to predict patients at particularly high risk of age-related macular degeneration – a condition caused by a progressive loss of cells in the retina – with the aim of identifying candidates for preventative treatment. Because the eye acts as a window to the brain, other AI tools are being developed with the aim of detecting early signs of brain tumours or neurological diseases like Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's. According to Dr Siegfried Wagner of the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital, AI can detect signs of multiple sclerosis through an asymmetry which only becomes apparent when scanning the left and right eyes. He predicts that in the future, such patients could be immediately referred for an MRI scan to investigate further. 'One eye might look completely normal, but AI can pick up a subtle thinning or thickening in the retinal nerve fibres of the other eye,' says Dr Wagner. 'It happens because in multiple sclerosis you get multiple small lesions in the brain, and they're more in one half of the brain than the other. So, you're seeing a reflection of what's happening in the brain, but in the eye.' One of the biggest hopes for AI is that it could find a way to predict early warning signs for dementia many years before the onset of symptoms. Indeed, Will Whiteley, Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, and a consultant neurologist in NHS Lothian, is leading a major new project to try to train an AI model to do just that, using a bank of CT and MRI scans collected through patients in Scotland over the course of 10 years. 'Right now, neurologists look for shrinkage in parts of the brain called the temporal lob, which are particularly responsible for memory, and a sign of Alzheimer's disease,' says Prof Whiteley. 'Vascular dementia affects the small vessels of the brain, and you can see that on a brain scan, too. But I hope that with these very powerful and flexible AI models, they'll be doing more, finding new things that we hadn't thought of as humans. We're not there yet, but wouldn't it be great if in future all 50-year-olds could take a test to tell you about your risk of dementia and whether you should or shouldn't take a medicine to prevent you getting it in later life?' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Rare rabies-like virus found in island bat
An injured bat that was rescued from a back garden turned out to have an extremely rare, rabies-like virus, the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs has said. The animal was found earlier this month in Shorwell on the Isle of Wight. The resident picked it up wearing gloves and kept it in a shoebox overnight, while waiting for it to be collected by volunteers from Isle of Wight Bat Hospital. Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) said the bat was later found to have a virus that caused rabies, known as European Bat Lyssavirus-1 (EBLV-1) - but Defra said other mammals were not considered to be at risk. Animal, Plant and Health Agency (APHA) said it investigated and found no scratches or bites to humans or animals. There are two types of viruses that cause rabies carried in bats in the UK - EBLV-1 and EBLV-2. Both are extremely rare in the UK and their presence does not change the UK's status as a rabies-free country, according to Defra. EBLVs cause the rabies disease but they are not the classical rabies virus associated with dogs and responsible for most rabies cases worldwide, according to the Bat Conservation Trust. Alex Morss, from the trust, said: "Rabies-related viruses have only ever been recorded in less than 0.3% of all bats tested since 1986 (59 bats of 19,000 tested), and in only two of the 18 bat species present in the UK, the serotine bat and the Daubenton's bat." He added: "There have only been two recorded cases of rabies viruses from an infected wild British animal in a human in Britain since records began - One case was in 1902, the other case was in 2002." European Bat Lyssavirus-1 (EBLV-1) has been detected in Serotine bats since 2018, with the first case being found in Dorset, according to APHA. As of May 2024, 34 cases of EBLV-1 had been reported in the UK, according to research from the University of Surrey and APHA. Mr Morss said anyone who suspected they had been licked, bitten or scratched by a bat should contact the National Bat Helpline - 0345 1300 228 - and seek immediate medical assistance. Vaccinations provided soon after exposure are 100% effective in preventing the disease, according to the NHS. "There is no risk to human health if you do not handle British bats, even if they are roosting in buildings you use, Mr Morss said. "No action should be taken to disturb or harm any wild bats or their roosts. "Bats are non-aggressive, shy mammals and will avoid contact with humans." All 18 British bat species and their roosts are legally protected. Mr Morss said bats should only ever be handled by a person with a licence and after appropriate training, unless a bat in distress is being rescued, in which case thick gloves and a face mask or covering should be worn. British woman dies from rabies after puppy scratch Rabies death sparks 'jump in vaccine inquiries' Culling bats does not halt rabies
