Shropshire's midwife services are safe, vows health boss
Maternity services in Shropshire are safe - that is the vow from the health boss in charge of the county's two main hospitals.
Shrewsbury & Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SATH) is currently the focus of a Health Secretary-ordered review of the way it investigated a series of baby deaths over the past few years.
Simon Wright, chief executive of SATH, said the trust did not share information about the deaths well enough in the past.
He said: "There are areas we need to improve on and we are working on that.
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"Any death is one death too many - we are looking at what steps we can do to make it an exception and if we could remove it completely.
“Our primary focus is improving the care we provide our mums and babies and we are working very hard to try and improve.
"If we were presented with information saying the service was not safe, then we would stop it immediately.
"We have done this before in the past with other services.
"Nearly 99 per cent of all mums who access our service would recommend the service to friends and family.
"I would also recommend it to my friends and family."
Mr Wright said the recent close scrutiny is impacting on the whole maternity service.
He said it has led to services for women booked to give birth at Oswestry and Ludlow Midwife-Led Units (MLUs) being suspended until July 11.
And Mr Wright said he could not rule out further closures after this date.
He said: "We have had a number of pressures in the service which have been running for a few months now.
“We have seen sickness rates go up - largely associated with the pressures the service is under.
"Also we have seen a shift in mum's decisions. Inevitably we have more mums being fearful about being away from the main centre with all the technology that is there.
"We have to be able to move our midwives from the midwife led units to support staff in the main centre and keep our mum and babies safe.
"We are supporters of local services and we are not looking at removing services from our local population.
"I think we can't rule out a slightly longer period of closures so we can address underlining concerns.
"What we need to do to stop this cycle of closures happening is we have to get into a position where we agree what the model of care is using some of the national data to support it.
"We are spending the next two to three months looking at the service and provide a new model.
"Then we need to get out and appoint the midwives we need to support that service."
