Nottinghamshire Police say that a file related to maternity failings at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust had been deleted “intentionally or maliciously” by the Trust.
The scandal of maternity care at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) continues. Following an ongoing independent review into maternity failings led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, initial reports from the police enquiry suggest that data was deleted “intentionally or maliciously” by the Trust.
The Ockenden Review is the largest maternity inquiry in the history of the NHS, indeed it closed to new cases at the end of May.
It began in September 2022 and aims to examine 2,297 cases of harm to babies and women, including stillbirths, neonatal deaths, significant brain injuries to babies, severe maternal harm and maternal deaths. The bulk of these cases date from 2012 onwards.
As Healthcare Today reported in February, the Trust was fined £1.6 million following sentencing for the prosecutions of the deaths of three babies, Adele O’Sullivan, Kahlani Rawson and Quinn Parker in 2021.
It pleaded guilty to charges of failure to provide safe maternity care and treatment resulting in a significant risk of avoidable harm and, in one case, actual avoidable harm brought by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
The decision to close the review to new cases from the end of May 2025 is driven by the need to finalise the report by June 2026.
Patient safety emergency
Nottinghamshire Police launched what it has called Operation Perth in February this year into corporate manslaughter.
In an update in early June, detective superintendent Matthew Croome, senior investigating officer for Operation Perth confirmed that the force was investigating the trust for corporate manslaughter. These are “circumstances where an organisation has been grossly negligent in the management of its activities, which has then led to a person’s death,” he explained.
The team have received family folders from the Ockenden Review that are an assessment of the care provided to individual families, before reviewing these to identify if a crime has been committed, or not.
The police force confirmed that so far more than 200 family folders have been received by Operation Perth and around 2,500 are expected to be referred to the force.
In an email sent to the affected families by assistant chief constable Rob Griffin earlier this month, Griffin said that missing data was “most likely to be the action of an individual who had knowledge of the existence and location of the material”.
This did not happen as a result of “systemic corruption” but “it is most likely to have been done intentionally/maliciously rather than accidentally”. So far, officers have been unable to identify the individual responsible.
The data went missing in July last year but has now been recovered.
A statement from the Nottingham Affected Families Group describes the event as “a patient safety emergency” and has called for anyone with further information to come forward.
