NHS maternity leaders 'arrogant' over staff concerns

The chair of a report into maternity services in England has told the BBC that an NHS trust repeatedly failed to listen to concerns about care raised by staff members.

Baroness Valerie Amos said Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) was "arrogant" and felt as if there was an "Oxford way" of doing things - given its world leading status as a university city.

On Tuesday, Baroness Amos published her rapid review into maternity care in England, which saw her team speak to 450 families and visited 12 NHS hospitals.

OUH said it would "place the experiences shared with Baroness Amos and her team at the heart" of its plan to improve services.

Speaking to the BBC after the review was published Baroness Amos said staff in Oxford were "extremely concerned about the nature of the care they were able to provide".

"But there is also a defensiveness that we encountered when we raised issues with the trust itself," she said.

One staff member told the report: "Anything that is done in [Oxford] by [Oxford] that potentially isn't done anywhere else in the world is the [Oxford] Way. It is the best. Woe betide you if you challenge it."

Another said: "I think there's a lack of understanding about what we do and the pressures that we are under operationally… I also think there's an unwillingness there sometimes to understand."

Baroness Amos said there was "clearly a kind of a degree of arrogance about who Oxford are and what they're about" from senior leaders at OUH.

She said this left her with a "concern" that the trust's leadership "don't seem to be able to take on board the concerns being raised by their patients and by their staff".

"It's important to take a step back to listen to what is being said and to think about how the practises in Oxford can better reflect the feedback that's being given by patients and by staff," she said.

"Because what was striking in this report was the lack of basic care, so mothers describing dirty corridors, toilets covered in blood, mothers left alone and hungry, a lack of privacy, a lack of dignity."

As part of the report, staff at OUH raised issues around capacity and workload pressures, which Baroness Amos said had been seen across "pretty much" all of the 12 trusts investigated as part of her review.

One whistleblower told the report "we can't care for others if we can't care for ourselves" due to insufficient staffing levels.

"There's times that it feels really unsafe," they added.

A recent inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) detailed stories of community midwives being asked to work overnight shifts at the John Radcliffe Hospital straight after full day shifts - sometimes exceeding 24 hours.

Despite finding that safety on OUH maternity wards "requires improvement", the CQC boosted the hospital's overall maternity rating to "good".

"In terms of Oxford there was a particularity about some of these challenges," Baroness Amos said, adding that the OUH executive team needed to address these "as a matter of urgency".

Responding to the findings, OUH's interim chief executive officer Simon Crowther apologised for the "often in difficult and demanding circumstances" staff referred to in the report.

"We are sorry for the toll this has taken on them, and we thank them for their dedication to the families in their care," he said.

"Women, families and staff will be directly involved in informing, shaping and delivering the changes we make."

"We will listen harder, act faster, and hold ourselves accountable for the improvements that women, babies, families and staff have every right to expect," Crowther added.