The midwife leading the biggest inquiry into maternity failings in NHS history is charging taxpayers up to £26,000 a month.
Donna Ockenden has been chairing the report on Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust since 2022 and is paid £850 for every 7.5 hours she works, charged to NHS England (NHSE).
When quizzed about the hefty invoices sent through her company, she said: ‘I am working long hours.’
These fees do not include wider costs of the maternity inquiry charged to NHSE.
Add in daily expenses, wages of the clinical review and administrative team, HR services, transcription, insurance and office space, and invoices from Donna Ockenden Ltd can grow to more than £300k a month.
Ms Ockenden added there was a ‘profit element on the provision of clinical and administration services, but this is needed partly in order to meet various miscellaneous costs that do not come within the charges that are passed across to NHSE under the agreement’, The Guardian reports.
She was originally paid directly by NHSE but this was changed in January 2024.
The new supply agreement also saw her daily rate increase by 13 per cent from £750 to £850.
Donna Ockenden, pictured, the midwife leading the biggest inquiry into maternity failings in NHS history is charging taxpayers up to £26,000 a month
Ms Ockenden submitted invoices of more than £20k each month from March to July 2024, reaching £26,069.50 in July.
Tax advantages can be gained by charging fees through a UK limited company via a combination of salary and dividends.
Ms Ockenden said: ‘The current contractual arrangement provides value to the taxpayer, and involves my running every aspect of the review including coordination of a large team of clinical reviewers.’
She said that the original arrangement had changed after responsibility for producing the review shifted from NHSE to Donna Ockenden Ltd.
The midwife justified her hefty pay days by saying she would be spending a large amount of time on the delivery of the report.
Ms Ockenden charges more for her services each day than the weekly median wage, which currently stands at £766.60.
They demonstrate the spiralling costs of such reviews into NHS trusts’ services.
In early December, Baroness Amos published an interim report into England’s maternity services which said that it was ‘still struggling to provide safe, reliable maternity and neonatal care everywhere in the country’.
She has been chairing the inquiry into Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust since 2022 (pictured: QMC Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham)
Ms Ockenden has previously received praise for her work on reviews in Shrewsbury and Telford.
She said she had been backed by affected families to conduct a similar inquiry into Leeds teaching hospitals NHS trust, describing the potential role as an ‘honour’.
The midwife was considered as an option to chair an inquiry into University Hospitals Sussex NHS trust.
But shortly after, Health Secretary Wes Streeting revealed she was not going to be chosen for this role due to the time she was spending leading other inquiries.
He admitted that if he could ‘clone’ Ms Ockenden, he would, but that these inquiries needed to find a wider group of midwifes they could call on to act as chairs.
