Families involved in the largest NHS maternity inquiry have been left waiting over a year to receive medical records about their care.
The families are part of Donna Ockenden’s review into maternity care failings leading to the harm or deaths of mothers and babies at Nottingham University Hospitals Trust (NUH), which runs Queen’s Medical Centre and City Hospital.
The review, which started in September 2022, is the largest maternity review in NHS history, with 2,425 cases being examined, and is expected to be completed in June 2026.
Many families involved have submitted what are known as subject access requests (SARs) to NUH. SARS are a system that allows people to request copies of their personal data or other information about them held by an organisation.
Organisations must comply with an SAR within one month of receiving requests. This can be extended to three months if requests are deemed ‘complex’.
The trust apologised at the time for the delays and said new staff were being hired to handle the requests. Since then, 14 new staff have been hired in its information-handling service.
But it appears families are still waiting to receive information, with one family waiting over two years. NUH has now apologised again and says it plans to “eliminate” its SAR backlog by the end of 2025.
Carly Wesson and Carl Everson’s baby was wrongly diagnosed with a fatal foetal abnormality, leading to a termination at City Hospital in 2019. They first submitted a SAR in June 2023.
Ms Wesson and Mr Everson said in August 2024 they still had not received information after NUH informed them they would receive it no later than September 2023. The parents are still waiting for this data in September 2025.
Ms Wesson said there was a “wall of silence” on their SAR.
She said: “I can’t put into words how frustrating it is we’re still waiting. There’s vital information in there about our daughter.
“We’re broken anyway, it’s just another battle we shouldn’t be fighting. It’s our information, it’s beyond acceptable, it’s taken this length of time.”
Mr Everson said: “NUH are compounding the harm in families across our community. Quite frankly, it’s disgusting behaviour and shows NUH’s lack of respect and disregard for families who have already suffered life-changing harm at the hands of NUH.
“We just want answers for our wrongfully dead babies – it’s torture.”
Leicestershire mum Sarah Baxter had her son, Darren, in 2012 at City Hospital. Darren was born with three holes in his heart and Down Syndrome, which were both picked up following his birth.
Ms Baxter sent off her SAR more than 18 months ago, and while she has received information back, she is still waiting for missing files involving a scan report from the day before Darren was born and a neonatal chart from the day he was born containing oxygen and monitoring charts. She said this has added to the “trauma” her family have experienced.
She said: “[They] transferred [Darren’s] care to Leicestershire, they said [the holes in his heart] should have been detected prenatally. He was born incredibly poorly, there wasn’t enough skilled people [at NUH].”
Ms Baxter said the missing files would give a “better picture” of the care herself and Darren received, adding: “I think if it was picked up the team would have been there to care for him in a better way and manage him being really poorly – that just wasn’t the case.
“It feels a bit of a cover up. If that information was there in the first place it would have been sent off as a whole document.”
Sarah Andrews, whose baby daughter, Wynter, died 23 minutes after being born at QMC in September 2019, submitted a SAR in January 2024 and still has not received any data.
She had received updates on the progress of the SAR initially, but said those updates “ceased” in November 2024. In January 2025 she was told that NUH ‘didn’t know the status’ of her request.
Mrs Andrews wrote to NUH Chief Executive, Anthony May, about the delay in March 2025. This was then escalated to Andy Callow, Chief Digital and Transformation Officer.
While she has received “better” SAR updates since then, Mrs Andrews said: “It shouldn’t have got to that point, that point of escalation. A year and nine months since making that request… even with a large document, that’s still an excessive amount of time.
“We’re super frustrated. We have been through so much, through the worst thing possibly imaginable, and since then it’s been fighting to be listened to, fighting to be believed – now just simple things like getting our own data we’re met with these really unreasonable delays.”
Mrs Andrews said submitting SARs allows families searching for answers about their own or their families’ care to “try to piece it together”.
In the 2024/2025 period, NUH received 10,726 data requests, including SARs, with the trust completing 10,025 of the requests.
A new structure has been implemented to centralise, standardise and digitalise NUH’s information-handling service and reduce reliance on contractors, agency and fixed-term contractors and improve staff retention.
A new digital system has allowed daily analysis of requests to process requests from oldest to newest more quickly.
Since then, the SAR backlog has reduced from 1,688 to 900 as of September 2025.
In a statement, Tracy Pilcher, Chief Nurse at NUH, said: “We are very sorry that Carly Wesson and her partner Carl, Sarah and Gary Andrews, and Sarah Baxter and family have had to wait such a significant amount of time to receive their SARs. I recognise the impact that this has had on them and accept that this is not good enough.
“Last year, we commissioned an urgent review of our Quality Assurance processes and since then there have been improvements in the way our SARs are handled and responded to. However, I appreciate that this hasn’t been the experience in these cases, and for that I am sorry.
“We also have a plan to have eliminated our backlog by the end of 2025, so that in 2026 we aim to be able to respond to SARs within the statutory deadline.”
