I'm a midwife who left the NHS - maternity care is still ignoring the harm no one can see

Nearly 2,500 families. Babies and mothers who died or were harmed by the service that was meant to keep them safe. The findings are appalling, and by now they are familiar. We read them at Morecambe Bay, at East Kent, at Shrewsbury and Telford. Now Nottingham.

The headlines have been about those deaths, and they should be. But there is something in this report that will be read once and set aside. Alongside the clinical failures, it lays out the psychological harm done to families and to the staff who carried it. And buried in the detail is this: in 2025, while the review was still going on, funding for a service supporting parents through pregnancy and baby loss was pulled. Local charities, already stretched, were left to pick it up.

That is how it goes. When money is tight, the first care to be cut is the kind whose damage takes longest to show.

The report counts babies and mothers who died. It also counts psychological harm, and that harm kills too. This is not the soft end of maternity care. Suicide is the leading cause of direct maternal death in the period between six weeks and a year after birth. In the most recent national enquiry, of the 643 women who died during pregnancy or in the year after it, nearly half had a known mental health problem. Maternal deaths in this country have gone up over the past decade, not down, and mental illness is a large part of why. None of that is soft. It is women dying, and children growing up without their mother.

The report does not spare individuals, and nor should it. It also records real skill and real kindness alongside the failures. I am not writing about Nottingham’s staff, whose actions the review and the regulators are rightly examining. I am writing about the people I have worked beside across my career, in services up and down the country. They are among the most dedicated I have known. For most of them, the problem was never their commitment. It was the system around them. Demand kept rising, the service could not keep pace, and mental health care was always the first thing cut.

The report describes families left without honest answers. I know who pays when the support goes, because part of my work was supporting families after the death of a baby or a mother. Women sent home are physically well, but nowhere near recovered. Parents left to grieve with no one to call. Fathers and partners at the edge of it, frightened and unseen, because the system had almost no room for them. Families you could watch slipping through while no one had the hours or the money to catch them.

The staff pay too. Midwives and doctors holding these losses with no time to recover before the next shift, and often the first to meet serious mental illness in a mother without the training or the specialist support to manage it. They are doing everything they can in a system that was never set up to support them, either. They burn out. They go off sick. Some leave for good. A workforce running on goodwill is not a safe one, and goodwill is not infinite.

I left the NHS frontline because I did not want to read another report about that gap, or write one. I wanted to build something that reached people before things broke, not after. That is mine to get on with, and I know how small it is against a problem this size. What should worry all of us is the sentence Ockenden states plainly: these failures were known for years, and no one acted. Maternal mental health is not heading that way. It is already there. Every report names it. Almost none of the money follows.

If these reports are to mean anything, mental health has to be treated as safety, not as something running quietly alongside it. A woman who comes through her birth and is then left alone with untreated trauma has not been kept safe. She has been kept alive. Those are not the same thing.

And this is not the health service’s problem alone. Employers watch new parents return to work, carrying what they will never say out loud. A woman’s story is her own. But her suffering is not a private problem to be borne alone. It is a public responsibility.

The Nottingham families did the hard part, as other families did before them. They dragged the truth into the open. The least the rest of us can do is refuse to look away from the part of it that leaves no mark.

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Darcey Croft is an advanced clinical practitioner and midwife specialising in maternal mental health, and the founder of Mothermind, which supports families through fertility, pregnancy, loss and early parenthood.

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