Why Parents Who Lost Babies Are Speaking Out About Hospital Care in Sussex

Parents who lost babies during pregnancy or shortly after birth started sharing their stories on 5 September at a public meeting in Brighton. The meeting launched an independent review into maternity and newborn care at hospitals run by University Hospitals Sussex, a large NHS hospital group in southern England. A senior midwife named Donna Ockenden is leading the review (The Guardian).

Maternity services are the hospital departments that care for women during pregnancy and childbirth. Neonatal services care for newborn babies who need medical help, especially those born too early or with health problems.

The review will look into more than 1,000 cases going back to 2018. The UK government confirmed the scope of the review in May 2026 (gov.uk) after appointing Ockenden to lead it in April (gov.uk). Families who lost babies in Sussex had been campaigning for months to get this review started.

One of the parents preparing to speak is Susan Cacciacarro. Her daughter Chiara was her first child. During a routine scan at 20 weeks of pregnancy, doctors found Chiara had a hole in her heart. This made the pregnancy high-risk, meaning doctors needed to monitor it closely. At 34 weeks, a scan showed Chiara had lost weight over two weeks. Staff at Worthing Hospital, part of University Hospitals Sussex, did not plan to deliver the baby early. The birth was scheduled for 39 weeks. At nearly 37 weeks, Cacciacarro woke up and could not feel the baby moving. Chiara was delivered stillborn.

Before this review, a joint investigation by the New Statesman and the BBC in February 2026 found that at least 55 babies might not have died if they had received better care from University Hospitals Sussex. Another separate review reported by the BBC in June 2026 found that hundreds of babies and mothers died or were harmed because of "deeply embedded systemic failures" in maternity care (BBC).

Donna Ockenden has done this kind of work before. She led a major review into maternity care at Shrewsbury and Telford hospitals, which looked at the care of 1,486 families and published its final report in March 2022 (gov.uk). She also led a review into maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals and is currently running another review at two hospitals in Leeds.

At the Brighton meeting, Ockenden discussed how the review would work with affected families. Child Bereavement UK, a charity that supports grieving families, noted that many parents who gave evidence to Ockenden's earlier reviews had lost a baby, and that those reviews found many of the deaths were preventable (Child Bereavement UK).

The government has also taken broader action. It has recruited an additional 2,000 midwives and invested more than £149 million in response to maternity review findings (gov.uk). In June 2025, Health Secretary Wes Streeting ordered a rapid national investigation into NHS maternity and newborn services (gov.uk). In June 2026, the government extended something called Martha's Rule to all maternity services. Martha's Rule lets patients and families ask for a quick second opinion from a different doctor if they think a patient is getting worse and the current team is not listening (gov.uk).

The pattern from Shrewsbury to Nottingham to Sussex is becoming familiar within the NHS: individual hospital trusts miss warning signs, investigative journalism or family campaigning brings the problem to public attention, and then an external review led by Ockenden confirms the problem is systemic rather than a one-off. The Shrewsbury review covered 1,486 families. The Sussex review covers over 1,000 cases from a single trust over eight years, suggesting a similar scale of potential harm. What makes this moment different is that Ockenden is now leading reviews at three different trusts at the same time. That has never happened before. It reflects both how much trust she has earned and how widespread these problems are.

The policy response has grown alongside the reviews. Martha's Rule had not been applied to maternity services before June 2026. Its extension directly addresses something Ockenden's reviews kept finding: that doctors and nurses dismissed or delayed acting on concerns raised by parents, sometimes with fatal results. The Cacciacarro case shows this clearly. A pregnancy already flagged as high-risk, with the baby losing weight, was still managed on a routine timeline. That is exactly the kind of decision Martha's Rule is meant to challenge.

The broader context here is that the NHS is under increasing pressure to fix problems that keep appearing in maternity care at hospital after hospital. Ockenden has become the person the government turns to for these investigations, and her findings will likely shape how maternity care is run across the country for years to come.

In my view, what is happening across these hospitals points less to individual mistakes and more to a system that repeatedly fails to listen, escalate concerns, and act on warning signs. That pattern, more than any single case, is what should worry anyone who depends on these services.