The Department of Health and Social Care has confirmed the scope of the independent review into maternity and neonatal services at University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, with Donna Ockenden as independent chair. The department says the scope was jointly agreed after a series of meetings between affected families and Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting, and is intended to reflect the concerns families raised directly. That framing matters. The review is being presented not as a narrow exercise in checking records, but as a structured examination of what went wrong in maternity and neonatal care at the trust and what changes are needed to make services safer and more equitable for families using them now.
The review will examine cases from 2018 onwards, but the Department of Health and Social Care has also confirmed that Donna Ockenden may consider cases before 2018 where that is necessary. She may also look at cases in which women believe they meet the criteria for severe harm but the clinical record is incomplete or missing. The case categories are broad. They include stillbirth, neonatal death, maternal death, neonatal harm caused by severe brain injury, and severe maternal harm. Ministers expect the exercise to cover more than 1,000 cases spanning over a decade, which places it among the more substantial maternity reviews commissioned in recent years.
One of the more consequential choices is the inclusion model. Every family that meets the terms of reference is due to be included automatically unless it chooses to opt out, removing the need for bereaved or harmed families to make a fresh application at a point when many are still dealing with trauma, complaints procedures or legal processes. The full terms of reference are still to be developed with Ockenden and families in the coming months. That leaves important detail still to be settled, including how evidence will be gathered, how current and former staff will be heard, and how any early learning will be shared while the review is still in progress.
Campaign group Truth For Our Babies said the confirmed scope reflected years of organising by harmed and bereaved families across Sussex. As set out in the Department of Health and Social Care announcement, the group's position is that the review now needs to match the scale of reported harm, establish what failed, and produce both accountability and practical change. Donna Ockenden has said family evidence will be central to the review, alongside the experience of current and former staff across Sussex. She has also indicated that the process must reach disadvantaged, seldom heard and global majority families, pointing to a review that is concerned not only with clinical incidents but also with whether inequality affected safety, access and outcomes.
Wes Streeting has described the scope as deliberately broad and inclusive and said families are entitled to the full truth about what happened to them and their babies. For University Hospitals Sussex, that means the review is likely to examine leadership, incident management, escalation routes, safety culture and the way concerns were handled before and after serious outcomes. On the same day as the announcement, the Care Quality Commission upgraded the trust's leadership rating from inadequate to requires improvement. That is a notable regulatory development, but it does not remove the need for the Ockenden review. In policy terms, the CQC judgement is a current assessment of performance, while the independent review is a deeper examination of historic harm, organisational learning and accountability.
The Sussex announcement also sits within a wider maternity safety programme. The government 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 maternity and neonatal facilities. Ministers also point to a programme aimed at the two leading causes of avoidable brain injury during labour, Martha's Rule pilots in maternity and neonatal units in 14 trusts across six regions, and a package intended to reduce stillbirth, neonatal brain injury, neonatal death and preterm birth. Further measures cited by the Department of Health and Social Care include a Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme, schemes intended to improve midwife retention, the Graduate Guarantee for newly qualified nurses and midwives, expanded maternal mental health services, extension of the baby loss certificate scheme to historic losses, and NHS guidance on leading causes of maternal death including thrombosis, mental ill health, epilepsy and haemorrhage.
Ministers have also linked the Sussex review to broader reform. The Secretary of State has ordered a national maternity investigation chaired by Baroness Amos, said he will chair a National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, and presented these steps as part of a single programme to turn review findings into operational change across England. NHS England has also published an inequalities dashboard, while the department says anti-discrimination work and stronger systems for identifying safety concerns are being put in place. For policy professionals, the point is that Sussex is being treated both as a local accountability issue and as part of a national maternity safety agenda. The eventual value of the review will depend not only on the quality of its findings, but on whether they lead to measurable changes in governance, staffing, escalation and patient safety.
The Department of Health and Social Care has also stressed that the overwhelming majority of NHS births have good outcomes and that women should continue to attend maternity appointments. Families with immediate concerns are being advised to raise them with their midwife or healthcare team without delay. That caution is important in any high-profile maternity inquiry. A review of past harm is meant to strengthen confidence in current services by showing that failings are being investigated properly and that lessons are being translated into practice. For families in Sussex, the immediate change is clear: the review is now confirmed, the case categories are defined, and the default position is inclusion rather than exclusion.