To think a lot of midwives are.. just not very good?

Absolutely a&e the exception everyone seems to just get on with it. But other wards the nurses seem to spend their time chatting away ignoring patients.
I had my babies 40 ish years ago and midwives where bloody awful then too. I genuinely nearly died as they didnt notice i was haemorrhaging, luckily my dad did and I was rushed down to theatre sewn up and given loads of blood.

There’s a shortage so if they have the qualification they get the job, even if they’re shit. I’ve known good ones and bloody awful ones. SCBU nurses are all amazing though. It was so weird to see both and how different they were.

I think the appearance of lack of care comes though when you have tried really hard for years to be good at your job but the volume of work just wears you down completely. I doubt anyone goes into the career thinking: don’t much give a shit about these women. But over the course of time they get ground down.

That isn’t good enough of course and I’m really sorry to hear about your experience OP (and others on the thread). Everyone deserves a birth where they feel cared about and cared for.

I was really lucky. I gave birth in a fantastic private midwife led unit and, despite complicated births, each time I felt so supported and cared for. I suppose the difference was the time these midwives had. But honestly I couldn’t have asked for more. I think we need to fix the system and then maybe we’d find treatment we receive would also change. Nobody is at their best when they are burnt out.

It's posts like this this that make people wonder what is the actual point of them.

As an anaesthetists I’ve always found them bizarre.
A large percentage seem completely disinterested and many have bizarre ideas about childbirth that are dangerous.

Generally I’ve found the older generation of midwives who trained as nurses before becoming midwives good.

Theres a reason I had an elective c-section with minimal midwifery involvement.

I think the obsession with natural birth and breastfeeding was partially to blame? There was no balanced information or listening to my individual circumstances or wishes, just pushing their own agenda. I had to battle so hard to get the birth I wanted.

I think in recent years they have had to train and recruit huge numbers of new midwives due to shortages. That meant that there were large numbers of inexperienced midwives in the service.

I have had two high risk pregnancies- the first almost ended in both me and baby losing our life due to HELPP syndrome..

My first pregnancy everybody from midwives to doctors were terrible until the day i was rushed to surgery at 31 weeks to save me and baby..
Then the midwives changed and i had incredible midwives for the rest of the pregnancy and labour, i will never forget my labour midwives for the right reasons.. One was a student and she stayed on shift until after my girl was born to make sure she was healthy, she cried with me, hugged us all and she really did support me more than she will know, and she gave me a bit of faith in the system again..

My second pregnancy was high risk due to the first, and pregnancy midwives were fantastic but when i say my labour midwives are engraved in my brain for the wrong reasons!
I had a student who just wanted one more birth to be signed off, the qualified midwife didn’t like inductions (i was induced at 39 weeks because of PE signs returning) and she also didn’t like pain relief so my labour wasnt what she wanted to work on that night (in her own words!).
She pushed the drip to its limit, gave me back to back contractions, stopped my epidural without telling me, babies heart rate was sky high, as was mine and it ended in forceps and a post partum haemorrhage for me! I think the worst part she came to see us the following night, still on labour ward with me on a drip to reduce blood loss and she said ‘i said inductions weren’t good’ 🫠🫠

Had both ends of the scale, and i am thankfully done!

I had lovely midwives for my first 2 kids, all very supportive and professional, but one of the community midwives I had for my third was absolutely awful!

my third child was not a consensual conception, my notes were all marked up to say that so I didn’t have to keep explaining, but when I was overdue and asked the midwife for any advice on getting baby to come she said ‘what got it in will get it out so you could try that’ and laughed like it was hilarious until the healthcare assistant who was with her told her to get out of the room because she clearly hadn’t read the patient notes and then called another midwife in who was brilliant.

She never apologised but I never saw her again and everyone I did see, before and after the birth, was amazing. That healthcare assistant has always been my hero though.

My life was saved by a midwife when I developed HELLP syndrome with my first baby. It was also a midwife who confirmed my suspicions that I'd been given a latex catheter by the Dr when I'd told him about my latex allergy and he had insisted there was no latex in it. The birth was an absolute clusterfuck but the midwives were brilliant.

I felt a little underwhelmed by the midwives I experienced on ward after giving birth. Before the birth, good, during the birth, good (though longest was about 30 mins/ shortest about 5 mind so limited experience to go on), Aftercare on discharge pretty good, as I remember it. However, I felt the midwives on the ward after giving birth were pretty poor. Sorry - I'm certain it was probably an unusual experience. They just sat out drinking tea and didn't seem interested/were quite cold. I discharged myself after about 10 hours as a result. Looking back I found that a disappointing experience but, as I say, all the other midwives I met were competent/ good or excellent so just a bad experience probably. I guess we all just have limited experience to go on.

I’ve had 2 babies in the last few years. I can’t criticise the ante natal care or labour ward at all to be honest. A real range of characters, some were much more passive but generally I felt looked after.

Post natal ward, at least half of them seemed to have contempt for women and babies. Really wanted nothing to do with helping either. It was strange. Many of them were lovely though.

I think they take on the culture of the ward, if it's the culture of the staff to be disinterested, it filters to all of them, my husbands ex was a absolute horrible nasty twat through and through, and an alcoholic to boot, how the fuck she ever got to be a midwife I'll never know.

The labour ward midwives were great, very empathetic and encouraging. Could see I was terrified. They were very young and possibly not long qualified, but their supervisor/midwife in charge was also superb.

Community midwives and postnatal ward midwives absolutely terrible. Didn’t listen, made assumptions, wrote the wrong thing in my notes, put my baby in danger because they didn’t listen and laughed at my concerns (she ended up having to be readmitted the following day). They made pregnancy far more stressful than it needed to be. Postnatal ward midwives were forever hiding in the staff room where you could hear chattering and laughter rather than actually supporting women. Gave out wrong information (also putting baby at risk). Bad attitudes.

I imagine there are some good ones out there but maybe they go and get better jobs, leaving behind the terrible ones who wouldn’t get a job anywhere else?

YABU. Your theory is only based on your personal experience of having 2 children.

I will preface this by saying there are many amazing midwives, and they are all doing an impossible job given cuts and understaffing in the NHS.

A friend of mine who works in hospital theatres says midwives are the maddest most difficult bunch of people he's ever had to work with. And that's including the surgeons 😅

100% this. An NHS wide issue.

I think it’s that thing where just because they have education and knowledge and even experience they (I include doctors in this) think that they know better. NO ONE knows better than the person who is actually going through the process.

Yes I was meant to be having home birth ended up being induced in hospital due to preeclampsia. There was one lovely midwife but by the time I actually went into labour after being there 4 days she was off and there was a random from another hospital who just spent the whole time saying 'this isn't how we do it at the Princess Victoria' and being no help. The only food I had in 24 hrs of labour was 7 liquorice all-sorts as she didn't know how the lunch system worked. The emergency caesarean I had at end of it was cracking though! Fabulous anaesthetists.

I had high risk twins so encountered a lot of midwives. It was about half and half. Very worryingly I found a lot of them to be full of misinformation and old wives tales.

I find a lot of nurses to martyr themselves. It gets pretty boring.

Yep. Every midwife i saw with my second pregnancy pushed and pushed and PUSHED for a natural birth

Realistically they are only human. A perfectly fine midwife might be feeling unwell, demotivated by a horrible boss or a punishing schedule, exhausted, stressed out for a dozen reasons outside work - performance is bound to vary.

I had one night-shift midwife (36 hours of labour due to an induction) who really wasn’t any good at all - she failed to notice that my hormone drip had dislodged and was just pouring onto the bed while I slept under epidural. When I woke up I thought I’d wet myself - but it was the content of the drip. So she rammed it back in and turned it up to double strength without telling me, presumably to “catch up”. Then she decided to change the bed, but in so doing she knocked my epidural needle so it wasn’t working properly . The shift changed - she never mentioned the problem with the hormone drop - the new midwife didn’t check it and so my contractions went wild- needle off the charts for about five seconds at a time — and my epidural no longer working so I started to feel all the pain again. It was so intense and the baby started to suffer racing heartbeat - so then I was prep’d for an emergency CS.

I never complained because I was so poorly after the birth I just wanted to go home. I’ve never stepped foot in that hospital again!

It’s not a new phenomenon. My daughter was born 30 years ago and they were crap then too.

I am not sure, I had very caring and helpful staff around fairly minor surgeries (when frankly they could have just rolled their eyes, I wouldn't even have blamed them 😂 )

so childbirth, which is one of the most stressful, excruciating and dangerous process for women? It's just so wrong to be so uncaring.