Dear Resident,

I wanted to write to you about the independent review into maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) Trust, led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden.

The independent review, which officially opened on 1st September 2022, has been established by NHS England following significant concerns raised about the quality and safety of maternity services at NUH, in addition to those raised by local families from across our region.

The main purpose of the review is to trigger timely learning, action and improvement at the Trust, to ensure that local families and NUH staff can once again feel confident and have pride in the safety and quality of local maternity services.

Donna will be leading an expert team of experienced doctors and midwives working in maternity services right across England, from Newcastle to Cornwall (but with no connection to NUH), to investigate serious and potentially serious concerns in relation to maternity services, with her final report anticipated to be published in Spring 2024.

To view the full Terms of Reference for the review, please click here.

The Review will consider cases from 1st April 2012 to a time anticipated to be three months before publication of the final report, with Donna already writing to those families who were contacted by or joined the previous regional review which ended its work in June this year.

However, in order to ensure that the review is as extensive as possible, Donna and her team are appealing for anyone that has serious or significant concerns about maternity care at NUH to come forward, including current and former members of staff. 
For families whose experience falls into one (or more) of the following five categories:

• Term and intrapartum stillbirths
• Neonatal deaths from 24 weeks gestation that occur up to 28 days of life; the review team will also consider neonatal serious incident reports and neonatal never events 
• Babies diagnosed with Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy (Grade 2 & 3) and other significant hypoxic injury
• Maternal death up to 42 days post-partum
• Severe maternal harm to include cases such as all unexpected  admission to ITU requiring ventilation, major obstetric haemorrhage  e.g. cases where blood loss exceeds 3.5l, peri-partum hysterectomy, and other major surgical procedures arising  from the maternity episode, cases of eclampsia and clinically significant cases of pulmonary embolus requiring further treatment

Donna is asking you to make contact with the review via email at nottsreview@donnaockenden.com

If your maternity experience falls outside of these five categories, the review will still be able to consider your case, and important learning can be used to improve maternity care at the Trust.
 
NUH Staff can also contact the review to confidentially express their own concerns about maternity services at the Trust via staffvoices@donnaockenden.com or by completing the staff survey available here.

This is an extremely important issue that I know could affect people living in Erewash, and so if you have information you wish to share, I would urge you to please make contact with the review as soon as possible and the team will then get in touch with you directly.

Finally, all the latest updates about the review, including full details of Donna’s work, can be viewed at https://www.ockendenmaternityreview.org.uk/#

With best wishes,

Maggie Throup MP
Member of Parliament for Erewash

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