morecambe shrewsbury and telford east kent and nottingham maternity units whose names are linked with baby deaths and today the health and social care select committee counted both the human and financial cost of not making adequate improvements in england's maternity care about 700 000 babies born every year on the nhs the vast majority are completely safe births but still if we had the safety levels of sweden a thousand more babies would survive every year an expert panel commissioned by the health committee rated maternity safety requires improvement continuity of carer requires improvement personalized care so women are fully informed about the risks of all their birthing and pain relief options rated inadequate safe staffing requires improvement and there are some areas where progress has been made um particularly in for example reduction in stillbirths but if you dig down into that it's not across the board and there were significant issues still for people from minority ethnic groups so we felt that we we could give a good for part of that but not an overall rating so in the end the consensus view of the whole panel was that it was a requires improvement level in fact the inquiry heard of higher maternal death rates in black and minority ethnic women that staff were not always culturally sensitive and that the women felt they were not listened to hello certainly that's what this mother experienced as she begged her hospital to listen to her fears that her son levi had jaundice it's almost like you're living in two realities we're looking at him thinking this child is practically neon um and they're like oh no i can't i can't see it at all i pushed as hard as i did and he was immediately admitted so if i hadn't pushed that hard and i'd just gone with the healthcare workers i i don't know what would have happened and that's really scary i felt as though i was being managed as opposed to listen to it's kind of like shouting into the ether and no one's listening to you last week an investigation by channel 4 news and the independent found that dozens of babies have died or been harmed at nottingham university hospitals trust and in shrewsbury the current ochenton review started because of pressure from the parents of kate stanton davis who died shortly after birth in 2009 i think there are some very sensible suggestions in there with regard to third trimester scam talking about trying to find a way to move from a blame culture to a learning sharing culture um again i'm not sure whether there is sufficient detail in there to ensure that that is achievable i also think um the recommendation for the investment is is great however you know where are we going to recruit all these midwives and obstetricians from nhs england said it was committed to providing safe compassionate maternity services and had announced an extra 95 million a year significantly less though than the 200 to 350 million pounds a year extra that the report recommends the committee also recommended a change to the clinical negligence system looking to sweden where it is less costly and less adversarial and that in itself they said would save babies lives however parents we have spoken to all say they never sue for the money they sue because they haven't been heard and they want lessons learned