New maternity clinics in hospital's improvements

A town hospital will see three high-risk obstetric clinics held every week as part of new improvements.

Horton General Hospital in Banbury, part of Oxford University NHS Foundation Trust (OUH), celebrated the completed £115,000 redevelopment project of its maternity outpatient department, which includes two brand-new clinic rooms.

The hospital had obstetric-led maternity services until 2016 but it was changed to a midwife-led unit in 2017 due in part to problems recruiting doctors.

The Keep the Horton General (KHG) campaign group said the improvement was "welcome but this should be the start of returning the full service to the Horton".

The Horton said the department's bathroom facilities and clinic room with scanning facilities had also been upgraded.

It said there was now a new midwifery station in the waiting area, "improving visibility, support, and communication".

Milica Redfearn, OUH director of midwifery at OUH, said the upgrades "allow us to offer an improved environment for patients and staff, while also expanding the range of specialist care we can provide locally".

"We are grateful to colleagues at BOB ICB for their generous donation of a new ultrasound machine, which will support the delivery of high-quality, personalised care for women attending the clinic".

Yvonne Christley, OUH chief nursing officer, said local families would benefit from "expert care closer to home", in addition to "the excellent care provided by the staff in our midwifery-led unit".

The new clinics will be delivered by Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital specialist teams.

KHG chairman Keith Strangwood called it "a massively welcome small improvement".

"We need it looked at properly and just to bring back what we had.

"We had rotation of 32 midwives up until 2016, which have now dispersed - some of them stayed with the trust and a lot of them didn't. That's why there's been midwife problems at the John Radcliffe."

In July, the chair of a report into maternity services in England, Baroness Valerie Amos, said there was "clearly a kind of a degree of arrogance about who Oxford are and what they're about" from senior leaders at OUH. The trust apologised and promised improvements.

Women have shared their experiences of having felt "unheard and mocked" and "dismissed" by midwives - the failings have lead to severe conditions and stillbirths.

"It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that if you've got under capacity and you can't cope, no matter how many little cupboards you turn into birthing units at the John Radcliffe, you need to figure out what's going wrong," Strangwood said.

"If they looked at the history or they knew the history [of the Horton], things used to work really well."

He said his group and other campaigners for the NHS "would like to encourage people to value it when you're not using it".

"And keep an eye on it and what's going on because you'll go there one day and there won't be a service."

Strangwood said KHG was finalising a second dossier of 50 cases of women speaking of their traumatic childbirth experiences.

The BBC previously interviewed three women featured in the first volume.