The health secretary’s recent announcement of a national investigation into maternity care in England is very much welcomed.

It is especially encouraging that the inquiry proposes to collate all lessons not learned from previous inquiries, including the inquiries into Morecambe Bay NHS Trust in 2015 and East Kent Hospitals in 2022, and compile these into a national set of guidelines to improve care across all NHS maternity services. This should make implementation simpler and prevent common mistakes from being made.

As mentioned in Jon Crocker and Megan Owen’s article on the law of apologies in the Solicitor’s Journal, published on 11 April 2025, “we believe the reality is that a centralised review of the multiple inquiries that have been held into disparate NHS trusts over the last decade which pulls together the many common themes would be the most cost-effective way of reducing litigation.” Ensuring that the guidelines from the inquiry are properly enforced is also key.

Of the proposed reforms is also an overdue anti-discrimination programme to address inequalities experienced by ethnic minorities. This issue was outlined in the Maternal, Newborn and Infant Clinical Outcome Review Programme, in October 2024 which featured in our recent article published on 13 May 2025 which indicated that black women were still 2.9 times more likely to suffer adverse consequences during and after pregnancy than their white counterparts.

The findings of this national inquiry are set to be released in December 2025 and we hope that implementation shortly follows to address the systematic failures in the NHS maternity departments.

This blog was written by Kiran Razak, paralegal in our Medical Negligence and Personal Injury team.