The largest maternity inquiry in NHS history is published today, examining failings at two Nottingham University Hospitals maternity units across a period spanning April 2012 to May 2025. Around 2,500 families and more than 800 staff members contributed to the review, which is expected to set out in detail how systemic failures led to the deaths of babies and caused avoidable harm to mothers and infants.

The review was led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, who was appointed in September 2022 to examine care at Nottingham City Hospital and the Queen's Medical Centre, both run by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. Its findings are anticipated to describe failings of significant scale and duration, prompting renewed scrutiny of how maternity services are overseen nationally.

The trust has already paid a considerable price. It received the largest fine ever handed to an NHS trust for maternity failings, £1.6m, following the deaths of three babies in 2021, and has paid out a total of £101m in compensation to affected families over several years.

A criminal investigation is proceeding alongside the review's publication. Nottinghamshire Police launched a corporate manslaughter case into the trust in June 2025 as part of Operation Perth, its wider inquiry into maternity failings. On Monday, officers made the first two arrests connected to the investigation: two men, aged 55 and 59, were detained on suspicion of misconduct in a public office in relation to operating practices within the trust's mortuary service. Both have been released on bail subject to conditions. The arrests, according to the police, had nothing to do with the corporate manslaughter portion of the investigation.

Regulatory proceedings are also under way. The General Medical Council is examining 62 cases involving NUH doctors, of which nine have reached early investigative stages. The Nursing and Midwifery Council is reviewing 96 fitness-to-practise cases connected to maternity care at the trust. One midwife has already been subject to an interim order preventing them from practising while their case is decided.

Among the families whose experiences feed into the review are Jack and Sarah Hawkins, whose daughter Harriet was stillborn at City Hospital in April 2016. At the time, both were employed by the trust. An initial internal review found no obvious fault, attributing Harriet's death to infection. The couple rejected that conclusion and pressed for an independent examination. A subsequent external review, published in January 2019, found multiple failings and concluded her death was almost certainly preventable. Their civil case against the trust was settled for £2.8m, understood to be the largest compensation payment for a stillbirth clinical negligence claim in the country.

In 2019, Gary and Sarah Andrews lost their daughter Wynter. She died 23 minutes after being born while under NUH's care. The trust was fined £800,000 in January 2023 after admitting failures in both Wynter's care and her mother's. Gary Andrews said the report needed to serve as a wake-up call to the NHS, locally and nationally, that past practices could not be allowed to continue.

The Hawkins and Andrews families are among those calling for a statutory public inquiry into maternity care across England. Their position is that accountability should not rest with bereaved parents, that families should not have to fight to be believed, and that the institutional response to serious harm has for too long required individuals to drive it forward themselves.

The disclosure today comes after the 2022 Ockenden report on Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust, which was the biggest study of its type at the time and revealed decades of subpar service. The Nottingham inquiry now supersedes it in scale. Its release is expected to intensify pressure on NHS leadership and ministers to address what critics argue are persistent and unresolved failings in maternity services across England.