Birth trauma has become a feature of childbirth at the JR Hospital, Oxford. The unit is one of 12 hospitals under inspection by the National Maternity & Neonatal Investigation
In June 2024 Keep the Horton General published a Dossier of 50 cases of birth trauma reported to the campaign group by mothers from the Banbury area.
A second dossier is being compiled. If you have suffered birth trauma, please contact us in confidence.
In this distressing collection of stories, mothers describe unacceptable and unnecessarily traumatic childbirth – the result of the downgrade of the Horton Maternity Hospital, Banbury which was reduced to a midwife-only unit in 2016.
Before the downgrade the JR used the Horton obstetric unit to deal with its overflow at busy times. Now the JR is trying to manage 7,500 births per year in accommodation that is limited and outdated. The hospital trust has problems recruiting and retaining sufficient staff.
At least 2,000 of those births are born to mothers from Banburyshire who should be able to be delivered closer to home, at the Horton. The JR did not have trauma problems before the Horton consultant-led service was ended.
We know the midwives do their best and it is not hard to see why they are so stressed, in a unit so busy they sometimes have no time for breaks or even to go to the toilet.
The downgrade of the Horton Maternity Hospital came eight years after the Secretary of State for Health refused to allow an identical downgrade plan on the basis that it was ‘unsafe and inhumane’ to transport women in labour 25-miles for obstetric care.
The NHS paid £1.3billion in 2024 – 25 in maternity negligence compensation. The cost of running the Horton Maternity Hospital was estimated at c£2.1 million per year – a drop in the ocean, considering the emotional and physical damage now being suffered by some women (and in some cases babies).
To put this into context, for the year 2022/23, OUH spent £88.5 million on PFI (private finance) schemes – 5.9% of its entire turnover. These are loans for new buildings that should have been funded by Government through the public purse.
The Banbury hospital catchment is bigger than the population of Oxford city. It is growing exponentially. The catchment was 175,000 in 2016 when we lost our full
maternity service. In 14 years time, in 2040, it will be 405,000. The JR catchment will have grown as much. Banburyshire deserves its own obstetric unit to prevent mothers suffering trauma in this way.
KTHG is concerned that
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A generation of women will record traumatic birth experiences – the opposite of how childbirth should be
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A generation of women will be forced to have Caesarean-sections in subsequent births because not all who have had a C-section may subsequently give birth naturally
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Babies whose deliveries are left, sometimes for days before birth, with mothers on hormones and drugs, may be subject to harm. We are not aware of research into the long-term consequences of this commonplace management system
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Women are feeling abused and suffering PTSD and long-term mental health problems. The legal bar for NHS mistreatment is physical only. At what point will hospitals adopt a treatment code for emotional damage?
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KTHG believes JR midwives and doctors are under intense, unacceptable pressure through birth numbers (c7,500+ p.a.), leading to unacceptable ‘management’ of births and patient trauma described in the dossier.