Ockenden Launches Sussex Maternity Review as Parents Give Evidence of Preventable Losses

Bereaved parents began giving evidence on 5 September at a public meeting in Brighton marking the launch of an independent review into maternity and neonatal services at University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, chaired by senior midwife Donna Ockenden (The Guardian).

The review is expected to investigate more than 1,000 maternity and neonatal cases dating back to 2018. Its scope was confirmed by the UK Care Secretary in May 2026 (gov.uk), following Ockenden's formal appointment by the government in April (gov.uk). The launch followed months of campaigning by bereaved Sussex families.

Among the parents preparing to testify is Susan Cacciacarro. Her daughter Chiara, a first child, was diagnosed with a hole in the heart during a 20-week scan, making the pregnancy high-risk with regular monitoring. At 34 weeks, a scan showed Chiara had lost weight over a two-week period. Maternity staff at Worthing Hospital, run by University Hospitals Sussex, did not plan to expedite her birth, which was scheduled for 39 weeks. At nearly 37 weeks, Cacciacarro woke unable to feel the baby moving. Chiara was delivered stillborn.

The Sussex review follows a joint investigation by the New Statesman and the BBC, published in February 2026, which found that the deaths of at least 55 babies might have been avoidable with better care from University Hospitals Sussex. A separate independent review into Sussex maternity services, reported by the BBC in June 2026, found that hundreds of babies and mothers died or were harmed due to "deeply embedded systemic failures" in maternity care (BBC).

Ockenden's track record in this field is extensive. She led the landmark review into maternity care at Shrewsbury and Telford, whose final report in March 2022 examined the care of 1,486 families (gov.uk). She also led the review into maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and is chairing a parallel review into maternity and neonatal services at two Leeds hospitals.

At the Brighton meeting, Ockenden discussed the review's terms of reference with affected families. Child Bereavement UK noted that many parents who gave evidence to the earlier Ockenden maternity reviews were left bereaved of their baby and that those reviews highlighted many deaths as preventable (Child Bereavement UK).

The government's broader response to maternity review findings has included recruiting an additional 2,000 midwives and investing more than £149 million (gov.uk). In June 2025, Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting ordered a rapid national investigation into NHS maternity and neonatal services (gov.uk). The following June, the government extended Martha's Rule to all maternity services, citing Ockenden's review as a reminder of the consequences when women, families, and frontline staff are not listened to (gov.uk).

The trajectory from Shrewsbury to Nottingham to Sussex reveals a pattern that is becoming structurally familiar within the NHS: individual trusts failing to act on internal warning signs, national exposure through investigative journalism or family campaigning, and then an external review chaired by Ockenden whose findings confirm systemic rather than isolated failure. The Shrewsbury review alone covered 1,486 families. The Sussex review, at over 1,000 cases from a single trust across an eight-year window, suggests a comparable scale of potential harm. What distinguishes the current moment is that Ockenden is now simultaneously chairing reviews at three different trusts, an unprecedented workload concentration that reflects both the depth of her institutional credibility and the breadth of the problem her reviews keep uncovering.

The policy response has also escalated. Martha's Rule, which empowers patients and families to request a rapid second clinical opinion when they believe a patient is deteriorating, had not been extended to maternity services before June 2026. Its application to maternity care directly addresses one of the recurring findings across Ockenden's reviews: that clinicians dismissed or delayed acting on parental concerns, sometimes with fatal consequences. The Cacciacarro case, in which a high-risk pregnancy showing fetal weight regression was nonetheless managed on a routine delivery timeline, illustrates the precise clinical decision-making the rule is designed to challenge.