Bereaved parents to testify in major Sussex maternity services review

Susan Cacciacarro was nearly 37 weeks pregnant when she woke one morning in 2021 and realized her daughter Chiara was not moving. She had felt nothing—no kicks, no shifts, the usual language of a baby in the womb simply gone silent. Chiara had been flagged as high-risk months earlier, when a 20-week scan revealed a hole in her heart. The pregnancy had been monitored closely at Worthing Hospital in Sussex. Two weeks before that terrible morning, a scan at 34 weeks showed Chiara had lost weight. No expedited delivery plan was made. When Cacciacarro rushed to the hospital after noticing the absence of movement, staff could not find a heartbeat. Chiara was born stillborn. "Your world turns upside down and suddenly it's black," Cacciacarro said later.

She is one of dozens of bereaved parents now preparing to give evidence in a formal independent review of maternity and neonatal services at University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust. The review, led by Donna Ockenden, a senior midwife and safety expert, launched publicly on Saturday with a meeting in Brighton. It comes after months of pressure from grieving families and a joint investigation by the BBC and New Statesman published in February that documented at least 55 baby deaths that might have been prevented with better care.

Ockenden brings significant experience to the role. She led the landmark review into maternity failures at Shrewsbury and Telford hospitals and another into Nottingham University Hospitals. She is also currently chairing a review of maternity services at two Leeds hospitals. The Sussex investigation will examine more than 1,000 maternity and neonatal cases spanning back to 2018—a vast archive of clinical decisions, missed opportunities, and outcomes that will now be scrutinized.

At Saturday's meeting, Ockenden discussed the review's scope with the families who will be most affected by its findings. Cacciacarro, now a mother of two, emphasized what the bereaved families most wanted: not just accountability and transparency, though those matter, but concrete improvements in how maternity care is delivered. "We definitely don't want other families to go through this," she said. The families are organized under the banner Truth for Our Babies, and they are actively urging other affected families to come forward and participate in the process.

Ockenden acknowledged the weight of the task ahead. "I am absolutely aware of the responsibility I have to the families and babies across Sussex," she said when her appointment was announced. She committed to listening carefully to bereaved families and to actively reaching out to those whose voices might otherwise go unheard. The review, she said, would examine care comprehensively so that improvements could be made not just at the end of the process but as it unfolds.

University Hospitals Sussex's chief executive, Dr. Andy Heeps, issued a statement saying the trust welcomed the review and remained committed to supporting it fully. He noted that maternity teams had implemented changes in recent years and pledged to work with the review team to identify further improvements. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson expressed sympathy for the families and pointed to national efforts—increased investment in maternity safety, reforms following previous Ockenden and Amos reviews—aimed at ensuring safer and more consistent care across the NHS.

For Cacciacarro and the other parents who will testify, the review represents a formal mechanism for demanding answers about what went wrong and why. It is also a chance to ensure that the clinical patterns that led to their losses are identified and corrected. The investigation will take time, but it has already begun the work of centering the experiences of families whose trust in the system was broken.