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The proportion of trusts with neonatal mortality rates at least 5 per cent higher than their peer group average has risen to a third, from a quarter in 2022.

That is according to the latest Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk Through Audit and Confidential Enquiries report, which also revealed an increase in the national rate of neonatal mortality from 1.65 in 2021 to 1.69 per 1,000 total births.

The national audit classifies trusts from red to green, according to how far above or below their comparator group they are. 

Trusts impacted by high-profile investigations into deaths and harm, Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust and University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Foundation Trust, were among those rated “red”, as their rates were over 5 per cent higher than peer group averages.

Nationally, 41 trusts (34 per cent) were rated “red” for neonatal mortality in 2022, compared with 32 trusts (26 per cent), in 2021. However, no trusts were rated “red” for stillbirths, down from 17 in 2021, and the overall national rate also reduced.

Tommy’s charity CEO Kath Abrahams described the data as “sobering and unacceptable” and urged the new government to commit to reducing stillbirth and neonatal deaths by 2025.

Fallen angel

Greater Manchester was once heralded as the frontrunner for a radical form of health devolution.

Nearly a decade on and the region’s fall from grace is near complete. NHS England has formally issued a special measures notice that mandates NHS leaders to make urgent improvements — or face the sack.

The integrated care board has been accused of a “failure” of financial management, having last year promised that it would break even but instead end the year with a deficit not far off £200m.

In part, this was based on a pledge to make £130m in efficiency savings but for which there was “no management or governance arrangements or mitigations to its delivery”, according to NHSE’s enforcement undertakings.

Two reviews have dug into the area’s finances and leadership, but NHSE said it was not clear either had been implemented.

Mark Fisher, the ICB CEO, once complained that he did not have enough power to hold providers to account. Now, in a bitter twist, the care board is charged with not having an “adequate understanding” of how to oversee its trusts, particularly the acutes. 

Also on hsj.co.uk

We report that a mental health trust has named a former banker, who is also a governing member of the Nursing and Midwifery Council, to replace its long-serving chair in September. And a trust’s maintenance backlog has risen by 60 per cent in a single year — more than four times the typical annual increase — after its bid for national funding to rebuild its main hospital was turned down.