National maternity review announced in Wales

The review will be independently chaired and will examine maternity and neonatal care in hospitals across the country.

The move follows a recent damning review into care at Swansea Bay University Health Board, and an inquest into the death of Liliwen Iris Thomas, who died hours after her birth when her mother was left alone at University Hospital of Wales, having been given so much pain relief she did not even know Liliwen had been delivered.

The review will begin in the coming days, with the Welsh Government committing to tackling the issue of poor maternity care.

It follows the launch of an independent review of NHS maternity services in England, which will report back to Health Secretary Wes Streeting by the end of the year.

Earlier this week, Swansea Bay was escalated to the second highest level of intervention, following a report which revealed more than three quarters of women had had a negative experience or received poor care from its maternity services.

Last week, the inquest into Liliwen’s death saw coroner Rachel Knight say she would be preparing a Prevention of Future Deaths report as she remained concerned that NICE guidelines on labour induction were “not sufficiently explicit”.

Lara Bennett, senior associate at Slater and Gordon, represents Liliwen’s family.

"We very much welcome the appointment of an independent chair to assess maternity services across Wales - this is very badly needed and long overdue. Mothers have suffered trauma and devastation, families have suffered the most unimaginable ordeals due to failings in maternity care, and this really should have been dealt with long ago,” she says.

"Recent cases such as the avoidable death of Liliwen show that we need to be starting with the very basics and making improvement from there - Liliwen's mother was left unattended despite a high risk pregnancy, given so much pain relief she did not even know she had given birth to her daughter, which points to failings in staffing levels as well as a lack of routine observations on mothers in labour. This is utterly unacceptable, and this review needs to address every aspect of maternity care to ensure positive change is made and a tragedy like Liliwen's can never happen again."