Restore, Repair and Rebuild NHS maternity care after the Ockendon and Amos reports!
In the last week of June, 2026, we saw two hugely significant reports on the damage to NHS maternity services. One report was from Donna Ockendon about long term harm done at Nottingham Hospitals. The other, the Independent National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation, was from Valerie Amos about the situation in ten other major hospitals. The reports describe brutal harm to so many women and babies.
Our love and solidarity go out to all whose pregnancy journey ended in achingly empty arms. Our hearts go out to families who lost their mothers and to the mothers so badly injured physically, emotionally or in their mental health. The additional pain when such an outcome could have been prevented is unspeakable.We send solidarity to those damaged by racism and to those women who were worst off financially and worst served by the Maternity service.
Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign says;
We demand immediate, significant and lasting improvements in the National Health Service maternity services across the country, in Cheshire and Merseyside and crucially in Liverpool. What we have known from women’s personal experiences has now been presented as formal reports. But many other reports raised the alarm before June 2026. Governments, NHS top bosses and the media knew what was happening long before recent reports and they clearly thought it acceptable, because they let the situation fester.
No ifs, no buts, no whining excuses. Things must change! Invest don’t cut! Babies not Bombs!
Deeds not words are required. We need the spirit of the suffragettes.
For all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends and lovers and for all the babies save Liverpool Women’s Hospital and every maternity hospital and service in the UK!
If these reports are brushed under the carpet as the twenty or more previous reports have been, this harm will be further normalized and the damage extended to ever more women and babies.
There must be immediate,and sustained improvements in the respect given to women, improvements in staffing, in resources, in buildings and equipment, and in management. No more cuts, no more bullying management!
Pregnant women, the communities, and the front-line staff must be included in decisions made about how these these improvements must look and feel.
We stand with the staff who kept the service afloat under terrible conditions. We acknowledge the Midwives who marched in 2022 and who are organising protests this year. We recognise that so many midwives left the profession in protest at the conditions in which women and babies were treated. We demand consequences for the government ministers, the senior managers and senior staff in the higher echelons of the NHS, and in Government, who saw the damage and ignored midwives’ and doctors’ complaints.
To women thinking of having a baby we say that even now most women have good outcomes. Some of the maternity services in the UK provide wonderful service. Do not assume the horrible conditions described in the reports from Donna Ockendon and Valarie Amos represent every birth.If you can, if you have the headspace, we welcome your involvement in this campaign.
We demand safer working conditions and improved staffing for midwives, obstetricians, anesthetists and all the related workforce. The NHS needs more midwives, more obstetricians, and related professions, not as a one off but consistently over a decade.
All those involved in individual acts of cruelty, malice or neglect must be held accountable, but so must the senior administrators and politicians who knowingly allowed this situation to develop and continue.
Britain can afford a good maternity service. Not having good maternity services is far more expensive. Yet in July 2026 maternity hospitals including Liverpool Women’s Hospital are expected to make cuts. How is this justifiable?
The NHS began seventy-eight years ago when the country was far poorer and reeling from the damage – emotionally, physical, and financial, done by World War Two. Our city was one of the worst affected. Liverpool’s children were still playing in bombsites, as the NHS was founded. It is obscene for the government to pretend that today we can’t afford safe care. In 1948 the country decided it was important and invested in the NHS. In turn, this dramatically improved the lives of women and babies.
Women need a greater voice in the service. Women giving birth must be heeded and treated as adults. Women have had to fight for their rights before and will fight now.
The damage to maternity is echoed in so many other aspects of the NHS. We see the overcrowded hospitals and corridor care, the long waiting lists and the over worked staff, the neglected buildings and the money wasted on huge privatisation projects. We see the unfilled vacancies and unsafe cuts. We see the billions handed to big corporations from NHS funds and the unsafe care as treatments are outsourced to for profit companies. Demand that the NHS is restored, repaired and rebuilt!
Join us in campaigning for respect for women’s right to choose their own birth options, more respect for women giving birth, better staffing, and an immediate end to cuts. Every woman and man involved in this campaign helps make the future of maternity better.
Even as Donna Ockendon was conducting her harrowing review into Nottingham’s maternity failings, the local ICB closed the infant bereavement services at the hospital as a cost cutting measure. They knew what Donna Ockendon was doing and still went ahead with brutal cuts.
Don’t think that public indignation alone will make the government take lasting action. Long after the Grenfell fire no one has been punished, nor have other high rise blocks with cladding all been made safe.
Every woman who helps in any little way helps make the NHS safer, makes a difference. We have to build a large movement, deep in all our communities to secure the safety of mothers and babies, and that needs lots of women getting involved.
Fight like your nanas and great nanas did when they fought for and won universal healthcare, free at the point of need.
Join us too in fighting for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, the largest maternity hospital in the country. Sign our petition here. At least now the ICB can no longer keep saying integration into a main hospital is always safer. We know of many problems at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, it is far from perfect. However, Liverpool Women’s did not have the bad outcomes described in these reports. We thank the staff for that.
More than ten years ago Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign was founded to stop Liverpool Women’s Hospital being forced into Liverpool Royal, and to defend maternity services in Liverpool. We have fought on and on. Liverpool Women’s Hospital still on site. The fight goes on to get all the staff and funding it needs but more than 90,000 people have supported us. If you fight you might just win, but if you don’t you will always loose. The struggle for safe and respectful maternity care is a life and death struggle we need to win.
In the 1970s women fought for better maternity care, including letting partners into the Labour Ward, giving women a say in their treatment. That campaign reached many women. We did see change for the better. The charity Aims(Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services) is one of the organisations that was set up in the 1970s during that time of successful campaigning.
Please invite our campaign to come and speak at your organisation, however small. We will publish a more detailed comment on these reports when we as a group have had a chance to discuss them in detail. If you would like to be involved in such discussions please contact us on savelwh@outlook.com or by commenting on the comments section of the blog. For detailed background information see this article from Keep our NHS Public website.
Save Liverpool Women's Hospital 