In July 2026 the Care Quality Commission (CQC) re-rated the maternity departments at Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath and St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester (both run by University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust) as requires improvement. Inspectors found delays in assessing women, medicine and pain-relief delays, equipment failures causing cancelled caesareans, and staff who felt burnt out and unheard.
If you or your baby were harmed during maternity care at either hospital, you are entitled to ask what happened and to get independent help in finding out.
If you would like a confidential, no-obligation conversation with a specialist maternity negligence solicitor, contact us today.
What did the CQC find at Princess Royal Hospital and St Richard’s Hospital?
The CQC inspected both maternity units between October and December 2025 and published its findings in July 2026. The inspections were carried out to check whether the trust had made the improvements the regulator had already told it to make, and to follow up on concerns raised directly by women, families and external partners.
Both units were rated ‘requires improvement’ overall and ‘requires improvement’ for being safe and well-led.
St Richard’s Hospital, Chichester:
- Staff could not clearly see women waiting in the maternity assessment unit, making it harder to spot and respond to a woman whose condition was deteriorating.
- Women on the postnatal ward did not always receive pain relief and other medicines in good time, with staffing pressures and ward delays contributing to longer waits.
- The bereavement suite was not fully separated from the labour ward, meaning families who had lost a baby could still hear sounds from other parts of the ward.
At Princess Royal Hospital, Haywards Heath:
- Equipment failures regularly forced the maternity operating theatre to close, delaying planned caesarean sections and increasing anxiety for women waiting.
- When the main theatre was unavailable, women were moved through public corridors and lifts, affecting their privacy and dignity.
- Nearly a third of women did not have their first midwife appointment before 10 weeks of pregnancy.
- Antenatal education was limited to in-person weekend classes with restricted availability.
- Staff described feeling tired and burnt out, and some said their concerns about staffing were not always listened to.
At both hospitals, women were not always seen within 15 minutes of arriving at the maternity assessment unit, and medical reviews did not always happen quickly enough.
What the CQC said was working well
Inspectors heard women and their loved ones consistently describe staff as kind, caring and professional and many described positive experiences. Bereavement support was singled out as a genuine strength. Specialist bereavement midwives supported families for as long as they needed, including through subsequent pregnancies and support for fathers and partners was available seven days a week. The trust scored above the national average for treating women with kindness and compassion and well above average for involving partners.
What happens next
A breach of the regulations on staffing identified at a previous inspection of Princess Royal Hospital remained unresolved and inspectors found two further breaches relating to safe care and treatment and good governance. The trust must now give the CQC an action plan setting out how it will fix these issues at both hospitals and the CQC has said it will continue to monitor both services closely.
University Hospitals Sussex has said it fully accepts that further improvement is needed and is committed to addressing the issues urgently, pointing to increased theatre capacity and staffing levels, strengthened safety monitoring and updated clinical guidance since the inspection.
Why this matters beyond Sussex
These reports did not land in isolation. They came weeks after two of the most significant maternity publications in the NHS’s history.
The Ockenden review of Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust reported on 24 June 2026, the largest maternity review ever undertaken in the NHS. Drawing on more than 2,500 family cases and over 800 staff accounts, it found hundreds of instances of potentially avoidable harm, including avoidable stillbirths, neonatal deaths and maternal deaths and babies left with brain injuries including hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy and cerebral palsy.
Baroness Amos’s National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation published its final report on 30 June 2026. It gathered evidence from more than 10,500 people, met over 450 affected families, heard from more than 9,000 staff and conducted reviews at 12 NHS trusts, University Hospitals Sussex among them. Baroness Amos concluded that the maternity and neonatal system is not set up to deliver consistently safe, high-quality and compassionate care, describing it as fragmented, overly complex and too slow to learn and improve. Her eight recommendations include a statutory Maternity and Neonatal Commissioner accountable to Parliament, new national standards and a right for families to an independent investigation where they do not accept the findings of an internal NHS review. A National Action Plan is due in December 2026.
The themes are painfully consistent and they repeat across two decades of reports – Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury and Telford, East Kent, Nottingham. Women and families not being listened to. Concerns dismissed. Chronic staffing pressure. Poor culture. Delays in escalation. Investigations that families are shut out of.
The CQC’s findings in West Sussex read like a local chapter of that same national story.
What the claims data tells us
The NHS Resolution Annual Report and Accounts for 2025/26 sets out the financial scale of maternity harm:
- new maternity (obstetric) claims rose from 1,157 in 2020/21 to 1,418 in 2025/26
- maternity accounted for 11.8% of the total number of claims notified, but 54.9% of the value of claims notified
- £2.9 billion was reserved in respect of maternity claims in 2025/26, compared with £1.8 billion in 2016/17
That imbalance, roughly a tenth of the claims, more than half of the value, is not evidence of opportunistic litigation. It is a direct reflection of what happens when something goes wrong at birth. A baby who suffers a brain injury during delivery may need round-the-clock care, therapies, equipment, adapted accommodation and support for the rest of their life. The compensation is high because the need is lifelong.
It is also worth saying clearly: a claim is not proof of negligence, and not every claim results in a payment. But the trend is unmistakable, and it points in the same direction as every review published in the last five years.
Our own research into maternity safety
We have not simply reported on this issue. We have investigated it.
Our Maternal Request Caesarean Section (MRCS) report examined whether NHS trusts were honouring women’s right, under NICE guidance, to choose a planned caesarean birth. Building on earlier research by the charity Birthrights, we wrote to the trusts that had not previously been found compliant. The results were stark: only a small minority of trusts were fully offering maternal request caesarean in line with NICE guidance. Many made the process lengthy, obstructive or inconsistent, and some told us in terms that maternal choice alone was not sufficient reason for a caesarean. The report received national press coverage and has been cited by the MASIC Foundation in its work on severe birth injury.
Our Freedom of Information report into stillbirths and neonatal deaths analysed NHS trust responses on patient safety and maternity care across England. In 2015 the government set an ambition to halve rates of stillbirth, neonatal death and maternal death. Our findings showed how slow and uneven progress against that ambition has been, and how inconsistently trusts capture, report and learn from the deaths of babies in their care.
“Isn’t making a claim just taking money away from the NHS?”
This is the single most common worry families raise with us, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan.
Compensation is not a windfall. It is a calculation of need
Damages in a maternity claim are worked out by reference to what an injured child or mother actually requires – care and case management, physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, specialist equipment, adapted housing, lost earnings, and the cost of a Court of Protection deputy where a person cannot manage their own affairs. Every element must be proved with independent expert evidence. Nobody is awarded more than their needs justify.
The money is not taken from a ward budget
Clinical negligence damages are met centrally through the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts, which is funded by member contributions and central Department of Health and Social Care funding. A settlement in Chichester does not close a bed in Haywards Heath.
Without compensation, the cost does not disappear, it moves
It falls on the family, on local authority social care, on the benefits system, and on parents who give up work to become full-time carers. The public purse pays either way. The difference is that damages fund a properly planned, properly resourced package of care that meets the person’s actual needs, rather than leaving a family to piece together whatever they can.
Claims are a symptom of harm, not the cause of it
The way to reduce the compensation bill is to reduce the number of injured babies. NHS Resolution itself uses claims data as a patient safety resource, and its Early Notification Scheme exists so that severe birth injuries are identified early and families are supported sooner.
“I don’t want to sue anyone. I just want to know what happened.”
That is what most families tell us, and it is a completely legitimate starting point. Bringing a claim is not the only route, and it is not always the right first step.
Depending on your circumstances, the options may include:
- Requesting your medical records. You have a right of access to your own records, and to your baby’s.
- The trust’s complaints process, which can produce answers without any legal step at all.
- A Maternity and Newborn Safety Investigations (MNSI) investigation, which independently investigates certain serious maternity incidents in England.
- An inquest, where a coroner investigates a death. Families are often unrepresented at inquests while the trust has lawyers; that imbalance is one of the reasons our team acts for families at inquests.
- A civil claim, where the evidence supports one.
Baroness Amos’s recommendation that families should have a right to an independent investigation where they do not accept an internal NHS review exists because so many families have found the internal route closed to them. Where transparency is lacking, legal action is often the only mechanism that compels disclosure and secures independent expert scrutiny of what happened.
How Tees can help
Our medical negligence team acts for families across England and Wales in maternity and neonatal cases, including stillbirth and neonatal death, cerebral palsy and brain injury at birth, hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy, severe perineal tearing, failures to offer or deliver a caesarean section, and maternal injury and death. We are ranked by the Legal 500 and our lawyers hold specialist accreditations in clinical negligence.
You will not be asked to pay us out of your own pocket
The overwhelming majority of our maternity cases are funded by a conditional fee agreement (“no win, no fee”) with an “after the event” insurance policy to protect you against the other side’s costs if the claim does not succeed. Legal aid also remains available for some cases of brain injury occurring at or shortly after birth. We will explain your funding options in plain English at the first meeting, before you commit to anything, and there is no charge for that conversation.
We will make this as gentle as we can
You will have one named solicitor who knows your case and your family. We will take the burden of gathering records, instructing independent experts and dealing with the trust. As well as this. we work at your pace and will tell you honestly if we do not think a claim can succeed, rather than raising your hopes.
We can help you get interim support early
Where liability is admitted, interim payments can fund therapies, equipment and adaptations long before a case concludes – the difference between a child getting timely intervention and waiting years for it.
We will help you push for change. Many of our clients tell us their strongest motivation is making sure it does not happen to anyone else. Where we can, we engage with trusts to encourage policy review, we support families through inquests where prevention of future deaths reports can be made, and we publish research, like our FOI reports, to keep pressure on the system.
How long do I have to bring a claim?
Time limits are strict, and getting advice early is always better than leaving it.
- Adults: generally three years from the date of the negligence, or from the date you first knew the injury may have been caused by it.
- Children: the three-year period does not begin until the child’s 18th birthday, so a claim can usually be brought up to their 21st birthday.
- People who lack mental capacity: there is generally no time limit while they lack capacity. This is important in severe birth injury cases, where a child may never acquire capacity to manage their own affairs.
- Fatal cases: generally three years from the date of death or the date of knowledge.
Even if you think you may be out of time, please ask. The court has a discretion to extend time in some circumstances.
