A new director of midwifery has been appointed at Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, as senior leaders continue to address concerns raised about maternity services.
Ilene Machiva will take up the role of Director of Midwifery and Deputy Chief Nurse on Sunday, 1 June, overseeing maternity units at Bedford Hospital and Luton and Dunstable University Hospital.
New leadership appointment
Ms Machiva will join the Trust from The Rosie Hospital in Cambridge and previously worked at Luton and Dunstable Hospital between 2002 and 2022, including as Head of Midwifery.
She has also held senior roles at Northampton General Hospital and University Hospitals of Northamptonshire NHS Group.
“I am honoured to be stepping into the role of Director of Midwifery and Deputy Chief Nurse, particularly at a Trust so dear to my heart,” she said.
“I am deeply committed to ensuring we provide the best care possible for families who place their trust in our care during their pregnancy journey.”
Chief nurse Liz Lees said the appointment would strengthen the Trust’s maternity leadership team.
“With Ilene in post, and the wealth of experience she brings, we will have a robust maternity leadership team in place,” she said.
Scrutiny of maternity services
The appointment comes as councillors discussed maternity services at the Trust at a recent meeting, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) reported.
Read: CQC finds “little change” as Bedford maternity services remain ‘inadequate’
Bedford Borough Council’s Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee met on Monday, 13 April, to examine services currently rated “inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission.
A report to the committee said 94 per cent of women rated their care as good or very good, and highlighted investment to ensure staffing levels are “safe, sustainable and aligned to the true acuity of our service users”.
However, concerns were raised around governance, staff training and incident management.
Debate over “safety.”
Cllr Graeme Coombes (Wixams, Conservative) said safety was a key concern for residents and questioned differences between the Trust’s position and the CQC’s findings.
Trust chief executive David Carter told the meeting it was “unhelpful” to describe maternity services simply as safe or unsafe.
“Maternity services by their nature are high-risk clinical services; they’re high-risk services where things will go wrong in all maternity units,” he said.
Mr Carter said the Trust and the CQC measured safety differently, with the Trust prioritising frontline staffing during periods of pressure.
He added that on clinical outcome measures such as stillbirth rates and neonatal mortality, Bedford “performs relatively well and it’s not an outlier”.
Ms Lees told councillors the Trust had since made progress on safety actions.
“We just signed off the safety actions for this year, and we’re completely complying for all 10 safety actions,” she said.
“That’s something we did in February, and that was signed off by the ICB board to say we were compliant.”
Additional reporting by John Guinn
Local Democracy Reporter
