The British Government apologized for the preventable death of 200 babies in 20 years

The British government apologized on Wednesday after a report revealed that the deaths of 200 babies in a hospital in the North West of England could have been prevented if they had received better care at birth.

“To all the families who have suffered so much, I am sorry,” said Health Minister Sajid Javid in Parliament. The report, which highlighted the magnitude of a scandal spanning two decades, “makes it clear that they were victims of a service that was there to help them,” he added.

Published on Wednesday, it showed that the stubborn refusal to perform caesarean sections and the lack of proper care led to the preventable death of dozens of newborns in the maternity hospital at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital.

Commissioned in 2017, the report analyzed 1,592 cases registered in that establishment, mostly between 2000 and 2019.

Five years later, the investigation revealed alarming conclusions, stating that 201 babies could have lived if the hospital had provided better care.

Nine mothers also lost their lives due to poor care, while others were forced to give birth naturally when they should have been offered a cesarean section.

The hospital “did not investigate (the cases), did not learn (from their mistakes), did not improve,” Donna Ockenden, who led the investigation, told a press conference.

The 250-page report includes cases of newborns with fractured skulls, broken bones and brain problems following lack of oxygen at birth.

“Significant or significant” failures were also found in a quarter of the 498 cases of stillbirth studied. In 40% of cases, no internal investigation was carried out into the cause of death.

Conservative MP Jeremy Hunt, who commissioned the report in 2017, said the findings of the investigation were “worse” than he could have imagined.

In a first report published in 2020, Ockenden noted that the hospital's caesarean section rate over the past 20 years had been consistently between 8% and 12% lower than the English average, a figure that the establishment presented as something positive.

At the national level, the midwives union did not end its campaign to promote “natural births” without caesarean section or epidural until 2017. And it was only at the beginning of this year that public health asked hospitals to stop using caesarean section rates as an indicator of their performance.

(With information from AFP)

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