HOSPITALS across the UK could learn from improvements secured within Barrow's maternity unit, a patient safety campaigner has claimed, after a new report revealed hundreds of babies are still dying unnecessarily within the NHS.

Assessors from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists investigated the births of 1,136 babies who died or suffered brain injuries during or shortly after birth in 2015.

They concluded better care could have resulted in different outcomes for more than 550 children in the Each Baby Counts report, published last week.

But the range of issues raised within the report - which include poor fetal heart monitoring and flawed internal investigations - mirror those found to have contributed to the deaths of 11 babies and one mother in Barrow's maternity unit between 2004 and 2013.

Dalton patient safety campaigner James Titcombe described the findings as 'appalling'.

Mr Titcombe, who received an OBE in 2015 for services to patient safety, has now urged other hospital trusts around the UK to learn from significant improvements achieved for women and babies following Furness General Hospital's Morecambe Bay maternity scandal.

He said: "This report shows that we can't carry on as we are.

"Our trust has done so well to transform services for women and babies - it's time the wider NHS looked to Morecambe Bay to learn from how they have done it.

"The impact upon every one of these families is colossal," Mr Titcombe added.

"This report really does illustrate that, nationally, we have a problem.

"We should not be accepting that sometimes babies die.

"The death of a baby or a mother should be considered a 'never event'."

Mr Titcombe's son Joshua died aged nine days old in 2008 after midwives at FGH failed to spot he had a treatable infection.

The government-backed Morecambe Bay Investigation went on to conclude staff working in maternity at FGH had poor clinical skills, fetal heart monitoring was not up to scratch and internal reports on baby deaths were of low value - which prevented opportunities to learn from them.

The new Each Baby Counts report has now issued a series of recommendations for improvements in a bid to make childbirth safer across the UK.

They include annual training for midwifery staff on interpreting baby heart rate traces and assessing all low-risk women in labour to see what foetal monitoring is required.

Prof Lesley Regan, president of the RCOG, said: "The fact that a quarter of reports are still of such poor quality that we are unable to draw conclusions about the quality of the care provided is unacceptable and must be improved as a matter of urgency."

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