The NHS is facing criticism for not recording the ethnicity of people who sue it over poor maternity care, despite black, Asian and minority ethnic women experiencing much greater harm during childbirth.
Health experts, patient safety campaigners and lawyers claim racial disparities in maternity care are so stark that NHS bodies in England must start collating details of people who take legal action to help ensure services improve.
The gap in NHS data emerged when Lime Solicitors, a London-based law firm, submitted freedom of information requests to NHS England, individual health trusts and NHS Resolution, the body that handles medical negligence claims against hospitals.
It asked how many people had sued over a stillbirth – the death of a baby before 24 weeks of pregnancy – between 2012-13 and 2022-23, and how many had secured damages, and also the ethnicity and nationality of claimants.
But all the NHS bodies told Lime Solicitors in their replies that they did not record the ethnicity or nationality of those who initiated a legal case alleging medical negligence. That leaves a “shocking blind spot” in the service’s data collection, the firm said.
Neil Clayton, a medical negligence partner, said the NHS’s failure to ensure such information was kept was “deeply concerning”. It could hamper its efforts to spot “worrying patterns of care failures” and improve the experience of maternity services for BAME families, he said.
“Given the well-documented racial disparities in maternity care this lack of tracking is simply unacceptable. Patients and their families deserve transparency, and without this information it is impossible to push for meaningful improvements in care.”
Clayton added: “The absence of ethnicity data is a glaring omission that undermines efforts to address inequality and ensure accountability in the healthcare system.”
Black women in the UK are almost four times more likely to die during pregnancy or while giving birth than their white counterparts. Black babies are twice as likely to die before reaching 24 weeks of gestation.
Paul Whiteing, the chief executive of the patient safety charity Action against Medical Accidents, said: “There is evidence that those from ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to experience poor healthcare. This can result in medical negligence. So it is shocking that the NHS collects no ethnicity and nationality data to better understand the drivers of this link.”
Whiteing added that the NHS did not record such details about the identity of people who made complaints about the care they have received either and should start doing so.
Prof Habib Naqvi, the chief executive of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, said if decisions about healthcare were based on incomplete evidence “health interventions will continue to leave our most marginalised communities under-supported and poorly cared for”.
Naqvi said: “It will mean that the NHS continues to fly blind in its attempts to meet legal and moral obligations to tackle health inequalities.”
The government wants to see better data collection as part of efforts to address the “stark inequalities for women and babies”, the Department of Health and Social Care said.
An NHS spokesperson said: “No woman should experience poor care because of her ethnicity or background and better data is essential to understanding where and how we need to intervene. We are taking immediate action to ensure authorities are improving how we collect data so we can identify and reduce inequalities.”
