'My ignored report could have stopped deaths at hospital'

A damning report that may have prevented the deaths of several mothers at a London maternity department was covered up, it was claimed today.

The doctor who was sent to investigate Northwick Park hospital said he warned health bosses of serious failings but was ignored. Two years later the hospital was engulfed in scandal after it emerged 10 mothers had died in childbirth there over four years. Dr Howard Baderman, former consultant in A&E medicine at University College London Hospital, spoke out after appalling conditions at a hospital in Stafford were revealed last week...

Dr Baderman, 73, said: "I was astonished when the Secretary of State said he could not understand why the situation had not been picked up earlier. From my experience this is not an isolated case." The Department of Health sent Dr Baderman and a team of other doctors to Northwick Park in 2003 to investigate claims that A&E waiting-time figures had been falsified, he said.

He wrote a highly critical report about the hospital and its senior management. But the report was rewritten so extensively by the Department of Health that Dr Baderman made them remove his name from it. It later emerged that 10 new mothers died after blunders in the maternity department between 2002 and 2005...

Source: The Evening Standard