Two grieving fathers' WhatsApp sparked NHS's largest maternity scandal probe

Gary Andrews was sitting with his phone when he decided to reach out to a stranger. He had been reading about another family's loss—about a daughter named Harriet who was stillborn at Nottingham City Hospital in April 2016 after doctors repeatedly delayed intervention. The story haunted him because it mirrored what had happened to his own daughter, Wynter, who died twenty-three minutes after being delivered by emergency caesarean section at the Queen's Medical Centre on September 15, 2019. Gary typed a message to Dr Jack Hawkins, Harriet's father: "Do you want to speak?"

That single message would become the spark for the largest maternity scandal investigation in NHS history. When Donna Ockenden published her independent review of Nottingham University Hospitals on Wednesday, it laid bare a catastrophe: 260 babies had died or been seriously injured as a result of what she called "deep-rooted, systemic and sustained" failings. The review identified potentially avoidable outcomes in 520 cases. Before presenting her findings, Ockenden paid explicit tribute to the families who had fought for answers, saying her review "owes its very existence" to them—and she named Gary and Sarah Andrews, Jack and Sarah Hawkins among those she credited.

Harriет's death had been dismissed initially. The hospital's own review found "no obvious fault" and attributed her death to infection. But Jack and Sarah Hawkins, both employed by the trust as a consultant doctor and senior physiotherapist, refused to accept that conclusion. They pushed for an external review, which was published in January 2018 and identified thirteen separate failings in her care. The review concluded her death was "almost certainly preventable." Yet even after the trust apologized and promised major changes, the Hawkins family discovered something darker: Ockenden found that Harriet's death had been "compounded by a systemic cover-up and investigations designed to mislead," a process that took a profound toll on their wellbeing.

Wynter's death followed a similar pattern of missed opportunities. Sarah Andrews had been admitted to hospital on September 14, six days after her initial contractions began. The maternity unit was busy that day, and information about her medical history was not properly handed over between staff at shift changes. Warning signs that Wynter was in distress went unnoticed. An inquest later found that multiple missed opportunities could have prevented her death from oxygen deprivation to the brain, and that she might have survived if she had been delivered earlier. A coroner noted that midwives had written to trust bosses in 2018 warning about staffing levels and predicting disaster—a prediction that came true roughly ten months later when Wynter died. The Care Quality Commission prosecuted Nottingham University Hospitals over Wynter's death in January 2023; the trust pleaded guilty to care failures and was fined £800,000.

It was weeks after Wynter's death that Gary reached out to Jack. When Jack replied quickly, the two families began to understand they were not isolated cases but part of a pattern. "It was like word for word," Sarah Andrews said later. "You could have changed Harriet's name and put Wynter's name in there and it would have been the same story." The difference was technical: because Wynter had taken a breath, her death triggered a coroner's inquest, while Harriet's stillbirth did not. That distinction mattered enormously. Wynter's inquest provided a public record of negligence; Harriet's did not, despite the external review's findings. Sarah Hawkins called this legal gap "frustrating," noting that if hospital staff had done their job slightly better, Harriet would have taken a breath and received the scrutiny her death deserved.

The two couples began working together to find other affected families. Sarah Hawkins and Sarah Andrews spent considerable time on social media and in media appearances searching for others. Kim Errington, mother of a child named Teddy, set up a Facebook group that eventually grew to nearly 600 members. With local MPs on board, the families secured a meeting with then-health secretary Sajid Javid. When the trust initially commissioned a "thematic review," the families campaigned against it, arguing it lacked independence and had too narrow a scope. In May 2022, Donna Ockenden was confirmed to lead an independent review instead. The scope expanded dramatically: by the following year, it was confirmed as the largest review ever carried out in the NHS, encompassing approximately 2,500 families.

The financial reckoning continued. In February of last year, Nottingham University Hospitals became the first NHS trust to be prosecuted by the CQC more than once, facing a £1.6 million fine for "avoidable failings" connected to the deaths of three other babies in 2021. The total fines now exceeded £2.4 million. Yet when Ockenden presented her findings, she noted that while maternity services at the trust had improved, they were "not yet where it needs to be." In March, following unannounced inspections, the services received a "requires improvement" rating. The trust's leadership issued an open letter apologizing "unreservedly" to affected families and acknowledging that "trust is earned through actions, not words."

Reflecting on what their daughters' deaths had accomplished, Gary Andrews said: "Together our two little girls have hopefully made a difference and other babies won't have died because of them." Sarah Andrews spoke of the bond forged among the families: "We always say it's a club you don't want to be in, but actually we've made friends that will stick with us for the rest of our lives." The two families had transformed their private grief into a public reckoning, and in doing so, they had exposed a system that had failed not once but repeatedly, across hundreds of cases, for years.