An external review has found that an NHS England initiative designed to strengthen leadership and improve culture in maternity and neonatal services has not delivered the improvements originally intended.
The Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme (PCLP), launched in 2022, formed part of NHS England’s three-year delivery plan following the high‑profile Ockenden and Kirkup reviews. Those investigations highlighted persistent issues across maternity services, including siloed working, weak leadership, and poor multidisciplinary collaboration.
Covering all 120 trusts across five cohorts, the PCLP aimed to bring senior maternity and neonatal leaders together as a unified perinatal quadrumvirate to drive cultural and behavioural change.
However, an independent evaluation by the University of Birmingham concluded that there was only “limited” evidence the programme had generated meaningful or sustained improvements. Researchers found that positive shifts within leadership groups “did not often ripple up, across, and down throughout services”.
The report pointed to a long‑established culture of siloed working across staff groups—an issue the programme “did not create the conditions to overcome”. Operational pressures, insufficient time for leaders to dedicate to the initiative, and a lack of wider organisational support all contributed to the limited impact.
Challenges were more pronounced in trusts where divisional structures made collective working between maternity and neonatal teams more difficult.
The findings suggest that more sustained, organisation‑wide commitment will be needed if maternity services are to deliver the cultural transformation called for in recent national reviews.
Source: HSJ, 2 March 2026