Hospital faces 37 claims over poor maternity service
Clinical Negligence News : 30 July 2012
It has been revealed that a hospital which was investigated for the poor quality of its maternity services now faces over 30 compensation claims for deaths of, or injuries to, mothers and babies.
The NHS trust running Furness General Hospital in Cumbria has stated that there had been a total of 37 civil claims since 2002. Of these, only 5 had been settled, and a total of 24 had been made since the start of 2011.
These figures were given by the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Foundation Trust to James Titcombe, whose baby son Joshua died at the hospital in 2008. Monitor, the body responsible for the governance of foundation trusts, and the Care Quality Commission, responsible for standards of care, have both heavily criticised the trust. An external review published for Monitor earlier this year revealed that the maternity services posed a "significant risk to mothers and their babies".
Titcombe has said that he was not one of those interested in suing the trust. It had admitted liability in his son's case. "I am doing everything possible to ensure it is properly investigated," he said. "It is a small maternity unit. Are there any other maternity units in the country, let alone one as small as this, where there are that number of cases?"
Eric Halsall, chief executive of the trust, resigned in February, stating that "considerable progress" had been made on improving the position. Eric Morton, the interim chief executive revealed this week that although nine cases had been launched so far this year, they relate to events which took place earlier. "Due to the fact that these are individual cases and the majority are yet to reach some form of settlement, it would be inappropriate to comment further," he said.
"As we have said many times before, we have badly let down women and their families with our maternity services in the past and are extremely sorry for that. There is still a lot of work to do, but so far there have been no claims instigated due to incidents in maternity services that happened in 2012."
Cumbria police are continuing their investigations into a number of deaths at the hospital's maternity unit. Detective Chief Inspector Doug Marshall said, "Our priority is uncovering the truth and conducting a full and thorough investigation on behalf of the families that have tragically lost their loved ones. There is a great wealth of information to examine in painstaking detail, and this scoping work is continuing to establish which cases may be included in the ongoing police investigation and which, if any, criminal acts have taken place.