BBC Panorama sees files on delayed Nottingham maternity review

The delay at Nottingham University Hospitals has become its own indictment. Donna Ockenden’s independent maternity review, opened in September 2022, was meant to expose what went wrong for mothers and babies at Queen’s Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital. Instead, the report has been pushed back to 24 June 2026, after more families came forward, while police, regulators and campaigners are still pressing for answers.

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust says the review was originally due in September 2025 and was extended because the number of families joining grew. The trust, which provides maternity care for more than 8,000 women every year, says it welcomes the review and is engaging fully with it. It also says it holds bi-monthly learning and improvement meetings with the review team and has a maternity improvement programme in place.

But the scrutiny around the service has only widened. A Nottinghamshire County Council health scrutiny report dated 18 March 2025 said the review’s scope was extended to include babies born outside NUH who were transferred into neonatal care. The same report said Care Quality Commission visits in June and July 2024 led to no immediate safety actions, even though the maternity service had already been rated Requires Improvement at both Queen’s Medical Centre and City Hospital in September 2023.

The pressure on the trust is not just about ratings. The scrutiny report said the independent chair had raised concerns about delays in subject access requests, complaints handling and poor-quality complaint responses. Those themes go to the heart of the accountability gap families have described for years: warnings were raised, but the system they depended on often seemed slow to listen and slower to act.

The case has also moved into criminal investigation. Nottinghamshire Police opened a corporate manslaughter inquiry into NUH maternity services in 2024, focusing on Queen’s Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital. Reports said Ockenden’s review team had already sent 200 files to police. The wider review is now described as the largest maternity inquiry in NHS history, involving nearly 2,500 families affected by deaths or injuries of babies and mothers.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said after the BBC Panorama programme Midwives under Pressure that “every injury or loss of life to a mother or baby is a tragedy” and warned that staffing levels were below where they needed to be. That warning still frames the Nottingham scandal. The final report may set out failures in one trust, but the scale of the case suggests a larger question remains unresolved: whether maternity safety problems across the NHS have been identified early enough, or fixed decisively enough, to prevent the next review from reading the same way.