Motherhood
Report flags serious concerns over NHS trust’s maternity care
An NHS England report has identified significant concerns about the safety and quality of maternity care at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
The findings, published after a visit in March, included 101 recommendations to improve the quality of care and ensure the wellbeing of mothers and babies.
Key issues involved staffing problems, a “challenging” culture, and poor learning from earlier incidents.
Over the past six months, the BBC spoke to 67 families who said they experienced inadequate care at the trust. Several said their babies suffered avoidable injury or death.
Five whistleblowers also raised safety concerns.
Two months after the BBC’s initial report, NHS England placed the trust under its national Maternity Safety Support Programme (MSSP), which is triggered when serious concerns are identified.
An NHS whistleblower told the BBC that “huge concerns” remained and that many of the same issues were raised back in January during a Rapid Quality Review Meeting.
They said the trust likely saw the MSSP findings as early as May.
A spokesperson for a group of bereaved Leeds families said the MSSP report, which also highlights good practice, made “truly shocking and horrifying reading”.
The spokesperson said: “As bereaved and harmed families, this most recent report, yet again, totally vindicates what we have been saying for years.
“The culture of denial, the failure to listen and the absence of real accountability are systemic and persistent,”
The MSSP report follows last month’s Care Quality Commission decision to downgrade maternity services at both of the trust’s hospitals from “good” to “inadequate”.
Fiona Winser-Ramm, whose daughter Aliona died in 2020 after what an inquest found to be “gross failures”, is one of dozens of families now calling for an independent inquiry to ensure accountability for baby deaths or injuries.
The BBC previously reported that the deaths of 56 babies at Leeds hospitals may have been preventable.
The trust’s chief executive, Phil Wood, announced earlier this month—just days before the report was released—that he will retire at the end of the year.
Wood has led the trust since February 2023 and was chief medical officer from May 2020.
Bereaved families said the timing of his departure raised concerns, given his leadership roles during years when dozens of cases of potential avoidable harm occurred.
Rabina Tindale, chief nurse at the trust, said: “This report has highlighted significant areas where we need to improve our maternity services, and my priority is to make sure we urgently take action to deliver the recommendations.
“I would like to apologise to all the families who have received maternity care with us which has fallen short of the high standard we aim to provide.”
She said the trust remained committed to delivering “safe”, “high-quality” and “compassionate” care.
Wood said: “My intention was to retire in the next 12 to 18 months, but with the changes taking place within the NHS nationally, this feels like the right time for me to hand over to a new leader.
“I am committed to making sure our robust maternity improvement plans, already developed with the CQC and NHS England, are fully embedded, and that we engage constructively with the Rapid National Investigation into Maternity and Neonatal services as it develops.”
Motherhood
Women’s HealthX marks World Maternal Mental Health Day with lineup of maternity care leaders
By Women’s HealthX
In recognition of World Maternal Mental Health Day, Women’s HealthX is placing a spotlight on one of the most urgent and under addressed areas in women’s health: maternal mental health and maternity care innovation.
Worldwide, 1 in 5 new mothers experiences a perinatal mood and anxiety disorder, yet up to 7 in 10 hide or downplay their symptoms.
Even within established care frameworks, this creates challenges for timely detection and treatment, highlighting the need for additional tools, insights, and system-level support to prevent long-term consequences for both mother and child.
Women’s HealthX convenes 750+ senior leaders from across the women’s health ecosystem, including pharma & biotech, hospitals, digital health innovators, solution providers, payers, enterprises & policy makers to explore how telehealth, predictive analytics, and digital health platforms are transforming maternal and postnatal care – from AI-driven early risk identification to remote monitoring solutions that keep mothers cognitively and emotionally supported long after they leave the clinic.
Key sessions on Maternity & Maternal Care with key industry leaders:
Key sessions dedicated to maternity and maternal mental health will address critical system challenges and opportunities for innovation, including fragmentation in care delivery, health inequities, and persistent maternal mortality rates in high income countries.
Featured speakers include:
Christina Pardo, medical director, women’s health, Weill Cornell Medicine NewYork Presbyterian, on “Bridge Existing Healthcare Gaps Caused by Fragmentation Between OB/GYN And Birth Workers.”
Gayatri Setia, director of preventive Cardiology, NYCHHC, on “Improve Patient Access to Prevention in Equalities and Discrimination in Maternity and Maternal Care”
Catherine Monk, founding director, Center for the Transition to Parenthood, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, on “Leveraging Developmental Neuroscience to Provide Improved Maternal Care”
Danielle Johnson, chief medical officer, Lindner Center of HOPE, on “Understanding the Scope of Disparities in Perinatal Mental Health”
Kimberley Sampson, chair of OB GYN, Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, on “Why Maternal Mortality Persists in High-Income Countries”
Erica Smith, VP value and access, Chiesi, on “Empowering Mothers, Advancing Equity, and Improving Outcomes in Premature Care”
A Call to Action for the Femtech Ecosystem
As femtech continues to mature, maternal mental health represents a critical frontier where technology, data, and clinical insight must converge.
Women’s HealthX provides a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing to accelerate the development and adoption of solutions that deliver measurable impact for mothers and families.
From predictive analytics to personalized, continuous care models, the event underscores a central theme: meaningful transformation in women’s health begins with better data, stronger evidence, and cross sector collaboration.
Special Limited Time Offer
Only 9 days left to register for your chance to win a therapeutic massage at Encore Boston
Women’s HealthX is where the transformation of women’s health begins at its true foundation: data, science, and evidence.
About Women’s HealthX
Women’s HealthX is where the transformation of women’s health begins at its true foundation: data, science, and evidence.
It’s the leading event dedicated to closing the sex difference data gap and accelerating breakthroughs through science driven, real world case studies.
Taking place on December 3 to 4, 2026 in Boston, USA, the exhibition will bring together more than 750 healthcare leaders, including clinicians, payers, employers, investors, and policymakers.
7 different stages across 2 days with 150+ expert speakers taking an holistic approach to women’s health.
From fertility, maternity, sexual health, cognitive health, menopause and chronic disease, we address care at every stage of a woman’s life.
Mental health
What Maternal Mental Health Month reveals about where postpartum support actually breaks down
By Morgan Rose, chief science officer at Ema, and Lauren Scocozza, vice president of product at Willow
May is Maternal Mental Health Month, and every year it surfaces a familiar set of statistics: 1 in 5 new mothers experiences postpartum depression or anxiety, most go unscreened, and the majority who are screened don’t receive adequate follow-up care.
The conversation is important. But the numbers obscure something that anyone who has worked in this space knows to be true: postpartum mental health distress rarely arrives with a label.
It arrives as exhaustion. As “I’m not sure I’m doing this right.”
As a question about supply, pumping, whether it’s okay to feel this disconnected from something you were supposed to love immediately.
Willow integrated Ema, AI built for women’s health, with the goal of closing the maternal care and data gap.
The pattern mentioned above appears consistently in Ema’s conversational data through the Willow app.
A mother reports mastitis symptoms.
Ema walks her through the clinical presentation, confirms she should keep pumping, and then she questions if she is using her pump correctly. In the same thread, within a few exchanges, she says she’s “feeling too sad.” Then: “I don’t know. I think I’m depressed. I am not enjoying my postpartum.”
She did not come to the app to talk about her mental health.
She came about a breast infection. The mental health disclosure came through the already-opened door.
The Weight Underneath the Technical Question
New motherhood involves an enormous amount of problem-solving at a time when cognitive and emotional reserves are depleted. The pump has to work. The baby has to eat. The body has to recover.
Work comes back. Sleep doesn’t. Feeding their babies requires skill, and the learning curve sits atop it all.
What Ema’s conversation data shows is that the emotional load of navigating these challenges is not separate from mental health. It is mental health.
When a mother writes, “I’m postpartum and overwhelmed and tired,” and then, in the same breath, asks about flange sizing, she is telling us what the postpartum experience actually feels like from the inside.
The technical question and the emotional state are one and the same.
Breastfeeding carries particular weight here.
The desire to breastfeed, the guilt when it doesn’t go as planned, and the identity questions that come with feeding choices are not peripheral to the postpartum mental health conversation.
In our conversations, women navigating supply concerns often reveal deeper anxieties: about whether they are good mothers, whether their bodies are “working,” and whether the difficulty they are experiencing means something about them.
These are the signals worth asking about.
What Screening Looks Like in Practice
Ema is trained on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and is equipped to offer the EPDS when a conversation warrants it.
The value is being present for the moment when a woman is ready to name what she’s feeling.
That moment rarely comes as a direct request for mental health support. It comes when someone is already in a conversation about something else, and something shifts.
A woman dealing with mastitis says she feels sad. A woman worried about supply says she doesn’t feel like herself. A woman managing the logistics of going back to work with a wearable pump says she’s not sure she can keep up with it all — and the “it all” isn’t about the pump.
Ema is designed to hear that. She doesn’t stay on the clinical or technical track when the conversation moves. She follows the person.
And when the moment is right, she offers the screening as a natural next step.
In one exchange, a woman was offered the EPDS after disclosing depressive feelings. She declined.
Ema acknowledged that and asked if she wanted to talk about something else. That’s the right response. The offer was made without pressure. The door stays open.
Sometimes what matters most is that someone asked at all.
The Continuity Problem
One of the most persistent structural failures in maternal mental health care is fragmentation.
A woman sees her OB at six weeks postpartum for a brief screening. She may get a call from a nurse. She may be given a referral she never follows up on because she doesn’t have the capacity to navigate a new care relationship while managing a newborn.
The clinical touchpoints are too few, too far apart, and too often siloed from one another.
The postpartum period lasts far longer than the six-week checkup implies. Mental health symptoms can emerge weeks or months after delivery, shift in character over time, and interact with physical challenges in ways that don’t fit neatly into any single provider’s lane.
A lactation concern becomes an anxiety spiral. A supply drop triggers a grief response. A difficult return to work surfaces a postpartum depression that wasn’t fully recognized at six weeks.
Ema sits inside these moments because she’s embedded in the platform women are already using. She doesn’t require a separate appointment, a referral, or the cognitive bandwidth to seek out a new resource.
She’s in the Willow app that mom is already using multiple times a day to manage her pump.
When Ema identifies a woman who may need more support than she can provide, she routes to the right resource — whether that’s a SimpliFed lactation consultant for feeding-related concerns or a clinical professional for mental health follow-up.
The conversation leads to the handoff with someone who can do more.
What the Month of May Means for the Rest of the Year
Maternal Mental Health Month is a useful moment of attention. The awareness campaigns, the social media posts, and the statistics shared in newsletters matter.
But the gap in postpartum mental health care is not really an awareness problem.
Most people in the perinatal space and beyond know the statistics. The problem is access, timing, and continuity.
AI doesn’t close that gap on its own.
What it can do is be present in the spaces where women already are, at the times when they need something, and attentive enough to recognise that a conversation about a pump, a clogged duct, or a supply concern is also a conversation about how someone is doing.
The question behind the question is often the more important one.
For Willow, the conversation data Ema generates is a map of where mothers are struggling, what they reach for when they need help, and when they are ready to say more than they came to say.
That information, used well, shapes better resources, better onboarding, and a more connected experience across the full arc of the postpartum year and beyond.
Building the infrastructure to support maternal mental health is a year-round project.
Willow is doing one part of that, and the conversations happening on the Willow platform every day are evidence that women want support that meets them where they are… in their app, in their moment, without having to ask for it twice.
About the authors
Morgan Rose is Chief Science Officer at Ema, an AI platform for women’s health. Ema partners with healthcare organisations and femtech companies to deliver clinically grounded AI support across the perinatal journey.
Lauren Scocozza is the Vice President of Product at Willow Innovations, Inc. For women by women, Willow is building a maternal care platform to address the interconnected challenges of postpartum.
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) has referred to the women’s health strategy as a ‘missed opportunity’ to address maternity services.
The renewed strategy was released by the government this week, with the aim of putting women’s experiences at the centre of care and ensuring they are “better heard and served”.
However, the government stated that because of ongoing investigations into maternity services across the country, the strategy “does not seek to address safety in maternity and neonatal services”.
The RCM described this as a “missed opportunity” and urged the government to ensure that, following the inquiries, maternity is placed “at the very heart” of the strategy.
Gill Walton, RCM chief executive, said the college was “deeply disappointed” that maternity services “do not feature as a headline priority” in the renewed strategy.
She said: “This is a significant missed opportunity and one that is very difficult to understand.
“Pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period are not a footnote in women’s health – they are one of the most significant and consequential phases of a woman’s life.
“A strategy that treats maternity as an afterthought is not truly a women’s health strategy at all. It is exactly the kind of thinking that has allowed maternity services to reach the point they are at today.”
Walton acknowledged that the strategy contained commitments on ensuring women’s voices shape their care, on supporting families through pregnancy loss and on the principle that services should be held accountable when they fail to listen to women.
She added: “But a strategy that addresses one part of women’s health while leaving maternity care behind is only doing half the job.”
Walton urged the government to ensure that this is addressed when the ongoing investigations into maternity care conclude, with any recommendations placed “at the very heart of this strategy with the seriousness and urgency that women, families and midwives deserve”.
In the foreword to the renewed plans, health and social care secretary Wes Streeting referred to the ongoing independent National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation as action being taken by the government to improve safety in maternity services.
The strategy also refers to the new National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, chaired by Streeting, which aims to help deliver “safer, more equitable care” for women, babies and families.
The foreword said that, because of ongoing initiatives, it was “important that this work continues without restriction and that the government can properly respond to the findings”.
It added: “This renewed women’s health strategy therefore does not seek to address safety in maternity and neonatal services other than that related to women’s health before and during pregnancy and the actions we are taking immediately to improve maternity and neonatal care.”
The strategy does, however, include plans to prioritise health education in schools, communities and healthcare settings to “empower women” with the “knowledge and tools they need to help control their fertility” and “prepare for the best pregnancy outcomes.
It also promises to provide women with access to “safe and high-quality contraception, abortion care, fertility services, preconception care and support after pregnancy loss in convenient settings.
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