Every maternity scandal ends with recommendations about culture, and not without reason. The next report should ask what women were actually walking into: short-staffed wards, broken continuity and services that staff were holding together shift by shift, Assa Samake-Roman ✍️ pic.twitter.com/KM0cp82RHh

— The National (@ScotNational) July 8, 2026

The above is outrageous. There is no evidence presented by the writer to suggest she is in any position to predict what the outcome of the Scottish Government’s independent review of maternity services in Scotland will be. How dare she and they claim to know without waiting to hear the results?

She opens with:

Over the past few years, Britain has commissioned report after report into failures in maternity care. Shrewsbury and Telford. East Kent. Morecambe Bay. Nottingham. Most recently, the national investigation led by Baroness Valerie Amos.

https://www.thenational.scot/comment/26261264.maternity-services-need-culture-change/

There is no British NHS to commission a report into maternity services across the UK. All that she refers to are into NHS England and they are horror stories we have heard no hint of here.

She then writes, directly connecting the NHS Scotland review in the future to horrors of Nottingham:

The Ockenden review was built around detailed case reviews of families where mothers or babies had died or suffered severe injury. It concluded there were repeated instances where different care would reasonably have changed outcomes for thousands of babies and mothers, and described longstanding failures to investigate incidents properly and trust-board oversight failures.

By contrast, the Scottish inspections published so far are regulatory inspections, not retrospective reviews of hundreds or thousands of adverse clinical outcomes. They identify risks and weaknesses—for example, staffing shortages, delays in induction, governance problems and inconsistent escalation—but they do not conclude that Scotland has experienced an Ockenden-scale maternity scandal. The Scottish Government’s decision to commission an independent review is largely precautionary and aimed at understanding whether the recurring inspection findings indicate wider systemic problems.

In a 2023 column for The National, Assa Samaké-Roman described a serious postpartum haemorrhage after a C-section following the birth of her first child. She credited blood transfusions and care at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary with saving her life during her early days of parenthood. https://www.thenational.scot/comment/23449156.assa-samake-roman-blood-donations-saved-life/

You might think I too should just wait till the Scottish review reports, before speaking in defence of NHS Scotland but, while I have no such first-hand intimate experience of maternity care in Scotland, unlike Samaké-Roman, I have fully researched the sector in terms of its performance based on the facts over several years.

Here are some:

How have we known for at least a decade that Scotland’s maternity services were not troubled like those in NHS England? More than three times per head, the cost of settling negligence lawsuits in NHS England

Why is the Herald hiding the trend in Glasgow maternity deaths? Are they falling, I wonder?

Baroness Amos is investigating 8 000 cases where babies may have died or been seriously harmed by inadequate maternity care in NHS England – today’s report into the QEUH Glasgow mentions none

‘An unannounced inspection by Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) has praised maternity services at Victoria Hospital, NHS Fife, for delivering compassionate, person-centred care’

As 58 babies might have survived with better care in Oxfordshire, BBC Scotland gleefully report one Scottish maternity unit not ‘up to standard’ in some way but no avoidable baby deaths

Short video – Crosshouse maternity unit inspection report requires no formal inquiry or police investigation, 16 trusts in England do, so BBC Scotland twist the inspection report to suggest ongoing worries though these were dealt with by Scottish Government 10 years ago

How can midwives be at ‘breaking point’ with 15% more than NHS England and far fewer (zero) maternity units in crisis