As Baby Loss Awareness Week 2026 arrives, our baby loss team at Enable Law are reflecting on another difficult year for maternity and neonatal care across England and Wales.
Over the last 12 months, there have been a large number of key events, including reports from investigations, announcements for new investigations, and the formation of the National Maternity and Neonatal task force. A number of maternity units have faced criticism, and as with North Devon District Hospital, staffing pressures have affected whether services can operate at all.
For families who have experienced the loss of a baby or serious harm during maternity care, what continues to be troubling is how familiar many of the findings are.
The question as we mark Baby Loss Awareness Week this year is therefore not simply what the reviews have found, but whether the lessons identified will finally translate into sustained change.
Timeline of published inquiries over the past 12 months
- December 2025 – the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation, announced in June 2025, released their initial findings, which were already deeply concerning. The report noted that previous inquiries had collectively produced hundreds of recommendations, yet similar problems continued to arise.
- February 2026 – the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation released an interim report, identifying concerns of widespread cover-ups and ongoing patient harm in the 14 NHS Trusts being investigated.
- February 2026 – a national review in Wales concluded and a document called The Path to Safer Beginnings in Wales was released and accepted by the Welsh Government. This review took a systemic approach to better services, rather than looking at isolated failures in individual hospitals – an approach that Enable Law would support in relation to maternity services in England.
- June 2026 – the final National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation report was released, identifying 8 themes, as well as recommendations to improve them. An update is expected in December 2026 with a National Action Plan. A 10-point plan of urgent action has also been introduced, which Trusts are required to assess and report on whilst awaiting the Action Plan.
- June 2026 also saw the release of the Ockenden Review into Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. This identified very similar themes to the national investigation, and urgent reform was noted to be needed.
CQC findings
Alongside these national reviews, CQC inspections have continued to identify maternity services requiring improvement. Over the last year, maternity services in Portsmouth, Somerset, Croydon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Sandwell and West Birmingham, Nottingham, Bedfordshire and Leeds have been subject to significant regulatory concerns, and ratings of ‘Requires Improvement’ or ‘Inadequate’.
The CQC findings often focus on unsafe systems, inadequate staffing and systemic issues which are outside of the doctors’ and midwives’ control. This is a theme also identified in a majority of the investigations listed above.
Not only are systemic and staffing issues resulting in poor CQC ratings, but they are also resulting in the closure of maternity units such as Yeovil Hospital (which has now reopened) and North Devon District Hospital, with all maternity patients now being redirected many miles further south to Exeter.
What’s next?
The next important milestone is the Government’s National Maternity and Neonatal Action Plan, which the Taskforce is due to present in December 2026.
There are also further inquiries taking place in Leeds and Sussex, but the findings are not expected to be reported for several years.
Reflection
Baby Loss Awareness Week is, first and foremost, a time to remember babies who have died and to recognise the lifelong impact of baby loss on parents and families. However, it is also a time to reflect on steps that could be taken for prevention, so that as few families as possible suffer this life-altering loss. Although the circumstances of individual families and hospitals differ, the themes coming out of the inquiries are strikingly similar – families are not being heard, risks are not being acted on quickly enough, there’s staffing and capacity pressures, and a lack of leadership and accountability.
Families bring claims and fight for answers often because they want to not only understand what happened to them and their babies, but because they want to prevent any other families from experiencing the same devastation. We hope that the Action Plan will result in changes being made nationally, and that an improvement in maternity care will start to be seen by Baby Loss Awareness Week 2027.
How Enable Law can help
If you believe you have experienced poor maternity care and want answers to your questions and changes to be made, our specialist baby loss team can listen to what happened and help you understand your options.
