Donna Ockenden, who has more than 35 years' experience working in health, initially as a qualified midwife, and has become well-known for the review she completed into failings in maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, which contributed to the deaths of more than 200 babies and nine mothers. She is currently carrying out an independent review into maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust which will be published next year. It is already the largest investigation into a single service in the NHS, hearing evidence from around 2,000 families so far.
But while she was a potential castaway on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, she revealed to presenter Lauren Laverne that it was the death of a baby called Gina - right at the start of her career - that has driven much of the work that she has done and continues to do. Ms Ockenden calls it "the Gina promise". She said: "I came onto my shift one evening and was told that a baby called Gina, who had been born at another hospital, was expected to die that evening.
I volunteered to help her parents through that time. I just wanted to help and we bathed and dressed Gina and then she died. Her parents made me promise to take her to the mortuary.
"I found an empty room and I sat and held her and I was so angry on her behalf and her mother's behalf because she shouldn't have died and the family had been let down. I thought 'that's it - I must leave midwifery'. "Then I thought that if I stayed,.