'Bullying, unsafe practices and dysfunctional culture': Consultant speaks out on Shropshire maternity scandal

Bernie Bentick, who worked at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals Trust (Sath) for almost 30 years, has spoken publicly about maternity care at the trust for the first time.

Sath is at the centre of the largest inquiry in the history of the NHS into maternity care, which is expected to report next month. An official investigation is examining the care that 1,862 families received.

Mr Bentick, who is now a Liberal Democrat councillor for Meole in Shrewsbury after retiring from Sath in 2020, says he told senior management several times about a deteriorating culture at Sath.

“I was increasingly concerned about the level of bullying, of dysfunctional culture, of the imposition of changes in clinical practice that many clinicians felt was unsafe," Mr Bentick told BBC's Panorama.

"If the resources had been made available to employ adequate numbers, to provide safe levels of care in accordance with national guidelines, then the situation may have been profoundly different.”

Mr Bentick went on to say that though some “cursory” investigations were launched into his complaints, he believed the trust responded in a way that tried to “preserve the reputation of the organisation.”

In an interim report published in 2020, Donna Ockenden, the head of the inquiry and a senior midwife, noted that caesarean rates at Sath were between 8-12 per cent lower than the England average.

She told Panorama that the trust had been lauded for its low caesarean rates.

“There were cases where an earlier recourse to caesarean section rather than a persistence towards a normal delivery may well have led to a better outcome for mother or baby or both. Low caesarean section rates were a prize.”

Last week, NHS England asked all maternity services to stop using caesarean section rates to measure performance.

In Maternity Scandal: Fighting for the Truth, which is on BBC One at 9pm on Wednesday, mothers share their experiences of the trust's maternity care.

One mother, Kamaljit Uppal went into Royal Shrewsbury Hospital in April 2003 expecting to have a caesarean section, as she had been told her son had been in a breech position during her pregnancy.

Instead, she was encouraged to deliver naturally and endured an 18-hour labour before medics ordered an emergency caesarean.

Her son, Manpreet, died two hours after he was born, and a medic’s conclusion was: “…if we'd given him a C- section earlier, he would have lived a normal life.”

The full Ockenden report is due to be published next month.

Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust declined to be interviewed for Panorama.

In a statement it said: “As a trust we take full responsibility for the failings in the standards of care within our maternity services. We offer our sincere apologies for all the distress and hurt we know this caused.”

The trust also said it has made "strong progress" including "significant investment in additional staff and staff training". It said it has completed over 80 per cent of the actions set out in the first Ockenden Report.