'We can do better': How Nottingham findings will guide Donna Ockenden's maternity review into Leeds

The chair of a review into maternity and neonatal care failings in Leeds has vowed to learn lessons from previous inquiries.

Hundreds of bereaved and harmed families attended a first meeting with senior midwife Donna Ockenden, who will lead the review into failings at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT), and members of her team in Leeds city centre on Saturday (July 18).

The meeting presented families with the opportunity to meet Ms Ockenden and her team, learn what the independent review will involve, understand how they can take part if they choose to, and ask questions about the process.

Speaking to the Yorkshire Evening Post, Ms Ockenden, who recently concluded a similar review into maternity failings in Nottingham, has pledged that lessons learned from that inquiry will be carried forward to the benefit of families in Leeds.

“The Nottingham review was of an extremely high standard but I always push myself as chair to get better,” Ms Ockenden said. “One of the things I know we can do better is earlier engagement with families, and an earlier start to large meetings which we have done today.

“We’re going to set out a timetable in discussion with families to hold these meetings every two months, plus very early engagement with Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust, and an early encouragement for Leeds maternity staff to come forward. I think that would be my top three things.”

Published in June 2026, the Nottingham inquiry - the largest of its kind in NHS history - found that hundreds of mothers and babies suffered potentially avoidable harm or died due to “deeply embedded systemic failures” at maternity units in the city.

A review into Leeds was ordered by then Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting in October 2025 following a string of damning investigations that revealed severe and systemic failings into maternity care at Leeds General Infirmary and St James's University Hospital.

Ms Ockenden was appointed to lead the review following repeated calls by families. She was seen as the ideal candidate having chaired maternity inquiries of a similar scale in Shrewsbury and Telford, as well as Nottingham.

The campaigning efforts were spearheaded by a number of families, including Fiona and Daniel Winser-Ramm, and Amarjit and Mandip Matharoo - whose babies died due to maternity care failings at Leeds.

“It was monumental for us to get Donna attached,” Amarjit told the YEP. “The reason we asked for Donna was because she does real time change at the same time as retrospectively looking at cases. So if something were going on in the Trust today then she could call them up and say ‘this needs to change now.’”

Daniel added: “Myself and my wife made a promise to our daughter when she died that her death wouldn’t be in vain, and that whatever needed to change to ensure it didn’t happen again was enacted. This is part of that process.”

Fiona and Daniel’s daughter Aliona, died just 27 minutes after she was born at LGI on January 1, 2020, in what an inquest in 2023 ruled was due to “midwife neglect” and “a number of gross failures of the most basic nature.”

Amarjit and Mandip’s daughter Asees, was stillborn in 2024 after Amarjit was sent home twice from LGI despite severe abdominal pain. The couple believe their baby could have been saved had the hospital taken their concerns seriously.

An investigation by the BBC found that the deaths of at least 56 babies and two mothers at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust in the space of five years, between January 2019 and July 2024, could have been prevented.

Taking charge of the review, Ms Ockenden said it was a “huge privilege” to have been requested by families and paid tribute to their bravery and resilience.

“It’s a huge responsibility,” she told the YEP. “They worked so hard to get this Donna Ockenden led review and it’s a huge privilege to be trusted by families, but they shouldn’t have had to fight so hard.

“They really were put through significant distress, significant pressure which was completely unnecessary. But they kept fighting and for that they were very brave.”

Saturday's meeting marked the start of the formal investigation, which will look at maternity care in Leeds over a 15-year period and potentially examine up to 3,000 cases.

In a damning report, published in June of last year, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) downgraded the maternity units in Leeds to “inadequate” and the neonatal service to “requires improvement,” citing serious risks to women and babies and a deep rooted “blame culture.”

Leeds teaching hospitals has previously said it was “taking significant steps to address improvements,” and promised to work “openly, honestly and transparently” with the review team.