Risk of serious birth injuries is rising for women in England, data suggests | Health
Women in England are at the highest risk of serious injury during childbirth since records began in 2020, NHS figures show.
The rate of women suffering the most serious type of tear during childbirth rose to 31.1 per 1,000 in January, February and March; this is the highest level since tracking began in 2020.
Similarly, the rate of women experiencing postpartum hemorrhage increased to 31.2 per 1,000 births in 2025; The highest annual rate in five years of data was collected.
Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman Helen Morgan, who took the figures from NHS England, said: “Behind these statistics are women suffering unimaginable trauma, requiring surgery and in many cases months, or even years, of recovery. Some will never fully recover.”
“This news shows that we need to treat maternity care as a national crisis. The truth is that until we make safety a priority, we will not be able to reverse this dangerous, unacceptable trend of increased blood loss and serious tears.”
NHS bosses and ministers are preparing for the publication of Lady Amos’s report into the state of maternity care from the government on Tuesday. This will contribute to increasingly urgent calls for a major transformation to make maternity care, which is often inadequate, safe.
There is growing speculation that Donna Ockenden, the senior midwife and maternity safety expert who last week published a damning report at the Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust into the NHS’s biggest ever maternity scandal, will be appointed as the first maternity commissioner, with a mandate to oversee much-needed improvements in the quality and safety of care provided.
Ockenden is currently investigating two other maternity scandals in Leeds and Sussex.
The government plans to publish an action plan for the transformation of maternity services by the end of the year. But pressure to announce its plans sooner is intensifying.
The rate of third- and fourth-degree perineal tears has risen to 31.1 per 1,000 from 25 per 1,000 in June 2020, when the figures were first published. The rate of postpartum haemorrhage, which involves the loss of one and a half liters of blood, has similarly increased over this period from 25.6 per 1,000 to 31.65 per 1,000 last year. 1,000. In early 2026, the rate was slightly lower (31.2 per 1,000).
The Department of Health and Social Care has expressed concern about birth injury trends. “These are worrying findings and, like last week’s shocking report into maternity services at Nottingham university hospitals [trust] “Too many women are being failed by poor quality maternity care,” a spokesperson said.
Last week it decided to extend Martha’s rule to all maternity and neonatal units in England, giving women and parents the right to a second opinion on the care of a mother or baby.
General director of the Birth Trauma Association, Dr. “The increase in tears is potentially alarming,” Kim Thomas said.
Thomas said this could be a result of better diagnosis, as the NHS has introduced a “care package” advising hospitals to diagnose and treat such injuries more quickly. He added that not only were older mothers and Asian women more prone to tears, but the NHS’s unusually widespread use of forceps when delivering babies could also mean more injuries occurred.
“I don’t think the significant increase in third- and fourth-degree tears is a sign that maternity services are deteriorating,” Thomas said.
Obstetricians also raised concerns after the Guardian found that the NHS in England was not properly recording details of all births.
Results for more than 85,000 of the 542,235 births in 2024-25 – 14.8% – were missing from the NHS’s Hospital Episode Statistics dataset. More than 100,000 of the 545,149 births in 2023-24 had similar outcomes.
Missing details include place of birth, method of delivery, birth weight of the babies, anesthetics used and how many weeks gestation the baby is.
Some NHS trusts also do not report all birth records to the separate Maternity Services Dataset.
“Missing data is a key barrier to improving maternity care,” said Clare Livingstone, head of professional policy and practice at the Royal College of Midwives.
“Without a full picture of what happens before, during and after birth, it is much more difficult to determine where action is needed, and these figures point to a significant gap in NHS birth data.”
