'Government must speed up maternity care changes'

Ex-Conservative MP Theo Clarke has criticised the government for its lack of progress in improving maternity care in England and Wales.

Ms Clarke has campaigned on the issue since making an emotional speech in the House of Commons in 2023 about her own maternity experience and also chaired an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) that made recommendations.

The former MP for Stafford suffered severe blood loss and needed emergency surgery following a 40-hour labour to deliver her daughter, at the Royal Stoke University Hospital in 2022.

She has now written a book, detailing her own harrowing experience, in a bid to help other women.

Ms Clarke launched the memoir "Breaking The Taboo - Why We Need to Talk About Birth Trauma" in London on Tuesday evening.

She said: "[The government] appear to have been under the misapprehension that I would disappear when I lost my seat - that is not going to happen".

Speaking on the book's publication day, Ms Clarke told the BBC she never expected to be writing a memoir about being a new MP and having a baby during her time in office.

"I hope by me sharing my story of my traumatic birth, it allows other mothers to feel seen and heard and listened to and that was very much the point of me writing it," she added.

Ms Clarke also called on the government to bring in the cross-party recommendations of the birth trauma inquiry, which called for an overhaul of the UK's maternity and postnatal care.

"The government has been in power now for 10 months and we've had no major announcements on maternity," she said.

The Birth Trauma Inquiry, published in May 2024, included evidence from more than 1,300 women who had experienced traumatic births.

Ms Clarke added there was still "so much to do" to improve maternity care for women.

"There seems to be a real shame and a stigma about issues in women's health and we don't talk about them enough and certainly not in Parliament - so I hope by me very publicly sharing my story has helped make that difference," she said.

"We've got to improve and standardise maternity care across the UK and that's the point of my campaign and that's why I've written a book about it."

Ms Clarke was joined at the launch by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, who conducted the independent review into the baby deaths scandal at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) and is currently chairing an inquiry into maternity care in Nottinghamshire.

Ms Ockenden, who wrote the foreword for the book, said: "Three years ago the then Secretary of State Sajid Javid agreed to implement my recommendations, but in the intervening years not enough has happened".

Earlier this month, it was reported that of the £100m allocated to improve maternity care in the aftermath of the SaTH inquiry, only £2m is ring-fenced this year to be spent on maternity services,

In response however, the Department of Health (DoH) said progress was being made.

"[This is] across a number of the recommendations from the APPG on Birth Trauma, including achieving 5.8% increase in the number of midwives," it said in a statement.

It added that this week it had announced a rollout of a national NHS training programme to reduce the number of brain injuries during childbirth.

After she lost her seat in 2024 General Election, Ms Clarke launched a podcast on the topic of birth trauma and interviewed campaigners and other women who had also experienced traumatic births.

A number of women from across the country also feature in her book, including Molly Hunter, a mum of three, who lives in Staffordshire.

Ms Hunter has endured a number of missed miscarriages - a pregnancy that has failed, but the body hasn't started the process of miscarriage - and said she wanted to share her story to try and make a difference.

"My contribution to albeit small, shares a different angle because a lot of the book is focussing on birth trauma and for my second, third, fourth and fifth pregnancies, I had the miscarriages and never got to the stage where I was able to bring my baby home," she said.

"Theo is breaking the taboo, talking about the issues that so many women suffer from and I think she has done such an important job.

"I think going through a miscarriage is a very very lonely process."

Ms Hunter hoped the book would "highlight the postcode lottery" that determined the care that women received.

A survey by Mumsnet in April found that the vast majority of mothers had experienced physical or psychological birth trauma, of which 53% said they were less likely to have more children because of their experience of maternity care.

The Tory government agreed to implement the recommendations of Theo's Birth Trauma APPG report last year, however nine days later the general election was called.

"In the turmoil that followed, the government let down women, three years on I'm still working, the government must listen," said Ms Ockenden.

"We are all born and we are all affected by this."

The DoH accepts there is more to be done.

"Through our Plan for Change, we are transforming the NHS, training thousands more midwives and have set an explicit target to close the Black and Asian maternal mortality gap," it said.

Ms Clarke said: "The campaign is not over and I am very unhappy that they have not adopted all of our recommendations".

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