NHS trust repays £5m over maternity failings

An NHS trust at the centre of concerns over its poor maternity services has had to repay almost £5m after wrongly claiming it provided safe care to mothers and their babies.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was paid the money after saying its services met safe standards of care and staffing.

But a subsequent investigation by the health service's litigation arm, NHS Resolution, found the trust had not met the standards and asked for the money to be repaid to the NHS.

The Leeds trust said they had allocated additional funding to improve maternity services.

The trust received the money under a programme called the Maternity Incentive Scheme, which is run by NHS Resolution to encourage the health service to provide good maternity care.

Hospitals are asked to judge their performance against a range of standards, including listening to patients' concerns, staffing levels and properly investigating deaths.

If a trust meets all 10 safety measures, it can get a rebate on its insurance premiums as well as a share of the money paid by trusts that do not meet all the goals.

For the past two years, the Leeds trust reported it had met all 10 standards and was paid £4,887,084 from the scheme.

But the regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), published a damning report in June about maternity services at the trust.

Care was rated as inadequate, the lowest level, and it warned that women and babies were being exposed to "significant risk".

The report prompted NHS Resolution to ask Leeds to re-examine its submissions to the Maternity Incentive Scheme. The subsequent review found not all safety standards had been met, forcing the trust to repay all the money it had received.

"The repayment of the award is long overdue and should be going back even further," said Fiona Winser-Ramm, who lost her daughter Aliona in 2020 after what an inquest found to be a number of "gross failures" in the care they received.

"This provides yet further evidence for the need for a full, independent inquiry into the Leeds trust," she said, believing this should be led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden.

Mrs Winser-Ramm was among a group of parents who met Health Secretary Wes Streeting last week and demanded an investigation into maternity services at the trust.

Streeting has so far refused to order such an inquiry but the families, who have all experienced poor maternity care, said they remained hopeful.

Over the past few months, dozens of families have told the BBC they received inadequate care at the trust.

The Maternity Incentive Scheme has been beset by problems since it was set up in 2018 by the then health secretary, Jeremy Hunt.

NHS trusts with poor maternity safety records, including Shrewsbury and Telford, Morecambe Bay, East Kent and Nottingham have all claimed to have met the 10 standards and been paid millions of pounds only to later have to repay it.

An analysis published by NHS Resolution in July found 24 trusts have had to repay premiums over the first four years of the scheme, with 18 of them having to do so more than once.

"Nationally, families have long raised concerns about the huge flaws of the self- assessment involved by individual trusts in the maternity incentive scheme," said Mrs Winser-Ramm.

"Serious questions need to be asked about how, if trusts are unable to accurately self-report compliance, how satisfied can we be that similar misreporting is not commonplace in other areas of self-reporting."

After the review found Leeds had to repay the money it had received, the trust applied to a separate fund run by NHS Resolution for maternity improvement support and was allocated £2.1m.

In a statement to the BBC, the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust did not explain how it had erroneously self-reported that it was compliant with all the standards of the scheme.

"We identified that we were not fully compliant with the MIS scheme," said Magnus Harrison, the trust's chief medical officer.

"We have now been allocated £2.1m to support our action plan to achieve compliance, which forms part of our Maternity and Neonatal Improvement Programme."