Donna Ockenden to Lead Sussex NHS Maternity Review

The government has confirmed that Donna Ockenden will chair the independent review into maternity and neonatal services in Sussex. For families who have spent years asking why serious harm happened at University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, that is not a minor administrative step. It is the moment when private grief is meant to become public scrutiny. According to the Department of Health and Social Care, the decision followed months of contact between Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Sussex families who had campaigned for an outside review. What matters here is simple: this process is being shaped not only by ministers and NHS leaders, but by the people who say the system failed them most badly.

That choice matters because Ockenden is not a neutral name in maternity safety. She led the landmark review into Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust, and she is already chairing reviews at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. In other words, the government has turned to someone already closely associated with some of the NHS's hardest maternity questions. For Sussex families, this is about trust as much as experience. When people ask for an independent chair, they are usually asking for someone outside local loyalties, someone used to reading painful evidence, and someone who understands that families do not want polished reassurance. They want the truth, even when it is uncomfortable.

The campaign group Truth for Our Babies has been clear about why this moment matters. Its members describe a two-year fight carried out while living with bereavement, trauma and long unanswered questions about what happened to them and their babies. They welcomed Ockenden's appointment, but they also stressed that the review must be broad enough to include all harmed and bereaved families. That point can sound procedural, but it is actually one of the biggest issues in the whole story. If a review's scope is too narrow, some cases are left out, patterns can be missed, and the final account may tell only part of the truth. Truth for Our Babies is still urging affected families to come forward, because collective evidence can show levels of harm that individual complaints sometimes fail to capture.

In her own statement, Ockenden said her priority would be to listen carefully to harmed and bereaved families, speak to staff on the ground and make sure families whose voices are often missed are also heard. That last promise deserves attention. In maternity care, some families face extra barriers because of language, disability, poverty, racism or a deep mistrust of institutions after previous bad experiences. An independent review is not the same thing as a court judgment, an inquest or a police investigation. Its purpose is to hear testimony, examine records, look for repeated failures and recommend changes while the work is still continuing. Put plainly, it asks four questions that many families have been asking all along: what happened, why did it happen, who should have acted differently, and what must change now?

The government is presenting the Sussex review as part of a wider drive to improve maternity safety across England. The Department of Health and Social Care says that since July 2024 it has recruited an extra 2,000 midwives and invested more than £149 million in 122 infrastructure projects across 49 NHS trusts to improve neonatal facilities. It has also introduced a programme aimed at reducing the two leading causes of avoidable brain injury during labour and piloted Martha's Rule in maternity and neonatal units in 14 trusts across six regions, giving families a route to ask for a second opinion. Those measures matter, but they do not cancel out what Sussex families have been saying. National plans can exist on paper while local care still fails in practice. You can recruit staff, fund buildings and launch safety schemes, and still have units where parents feel unheard, dismissed or left with devastating questions after harm. That is exactly why independent reviews matter.

The same government announcement sets out a longer list of reforms: efforts to reduce stillbirths, neonatal brain injury, neonatal deaths and preterm birth; a Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme; schemes aimed at keeping midwives in the workforce; expanded maternal mental health support; and the Baby Loss Certificate scheme extended to historic losses. NHS guidance has also been rolled out on major causes of maternal death including thrombosis, mental ill health, epilepsy and haemorrhage. There is another thread running through this that readers should not miss. Ministers say they have launched an anti-discrimination programme and backed an NHS England inequalities dashboard to spot where some groups face worse outcomes. That tells us maternity safety is not only about numbers of staff or pieces of equipment. It is also about whether women and birthing people are listened to, believed, treated fairly and given timely care when they raise concerns.

Sussex is also not being treated as an isolated problem by ministers. Wes Streeting has ordered a national maternity investigation, chaired by Baroness Amos, to produce one set of recommendations for England. He has also appointed Ockenden to chair the independent review into maternity and neonatal services at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, announced in March 2026, and said he will chair a National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce so recommendations do not simply gather dust. Taken together, that tells you something important about the state of maternity care. When several reviews are running at once, it becomes harder to describe each one as a one-off failure or a local exception. The pattern ministers are now recognising is one families have been pointing to for years: repeated concerns, repeated warnings and repeated struggles to be heard before more harm is done.

For Sussex families, though, this announcement is not closure. It is the start of another difficult stage. The real test comes next: who is included, how evidence is handled, whether staff can speak safely, how quickly learning is shared and whether the trust and government act on what is found. That is the part all of us should keep watching. Accountability in a public service is not only about saying sorry after the event. It is about changing systems early enough to protect the next family. If this review is thorough, inclusive and honest, it could turn years of campaigning into safer care. If it is narrow or slow, families will once again be asked to carry more than they should.