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

I’m also posting this.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdc8tXyk/

I feel so sad for this poor, desperate young mother and family. From what she describes I can’t help but think she has been utterly failed by the NHS.

1. I don’t know enough about pulmonary atresia so not sure how easy it is to pick up at 20 week anomaly scan but that would seem to have been the first opportunity when a major heart defect might have been identified.
2. Newborn checks. Back in time babies were checked over by paediatricians the day after birth or at some point before discharge home. The move towards discharging mothers within hours of the birth, even in the middle of the night in some cases meant it was not convenient to have a paediatrician check for all and there was a move to train midwives to do these checks which includes listening to heart sounds. I have no idea if there are any reliable studies/statistics comparing quality of midwife check to paediatrician check and obviously I don’t know what check baby Ollie had or when but that would seem to have been an occasion when something might reasonably have been picked up.
3. Midwife referred baby back to hospital at ten days. Were there really no signs of cyanosis/abnormal breathing/becoming breathless when feeding or other symptoms that might have been easily identified before ten days?
4. Then when she received diagnosis she was told that with or without surgery he could live a normal life, just wouldn’t be an Olympic athlete. WTF A quick google tells me that survival rates without surgery are 50% at one year and 8% at ten years. How was she given such uncaring and apparently totally inadequate advice?
5. I assume the mother has reached out to all the UK paediatric heart surgery units to be told there are no surgical options. But she has found one in USA. I really hope she is able to raise enough money and successful surgery is possible. Her treatment from the NHS is dreadful. Of course most of this has nothing to do with midwives but I question whether an alert midwife would have identified problems sooner.

Just putting this here.

https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2025-10-23/one-day-old-babys-death-was-preventable-coroner-rules

Midwives just told the parents the baby’s breathing was normal without doing basic observations.
Honestly I don’t know what’s wrong with them. Do the observations then you can note in the LEGAL RECORD which is your patient notes that the baby was observed, resps, sats, heart rate, temp all xxxx and mother reassured. Or to be extra careful ask a paed to check. But at least then if there was something showing they might have picked it up and if all the obs were within normal range they have their backs covered legally (not that that is any comfort to the parents).

Agree with you

Can you imagine staff on a cardiac ward for example standing there taking the piss out of patients who were complaining of pain, telling they were imagining it, or making a fuss out about nothing? When I had an emergency admisson to ENT all the staff were so sympathetic about the level of pain I was in and how unpleasant some of the treatment was, When I was shedding a few tears a nurse mopped them up and held my hand.

Dismissive midwives, uninterested drs.
Lying on my maternity notes (I never ate anything at all because they "forgot" I was there (?) My notes state I ate 3 meals a day!)
I've never felt so vulnerable or scared.

Agree with this! I've been in for an accident and subsequent surgery and could not fault a single one of the staff for anything. The ones doing the surgery for my csection were delights - back on the ward, back to misery!

You are not being unreasonable yo have a view on midwives based on your experience.

You're experience is definitely not in line with my experience though, but then I've only given birth twice so I don't feel like I can comment on the wider midwifery service.
My community midwife was amazing. The first labour was COVID times and when I had to go for a section my midwife was amazing. Second time I had alot against me to achieve my vbac and I think my midwife and the student supported me really well and probably are the reason I got my vbac in the end

My overall experience was of uncaring, not very bright women, being given a lot of power and abusing it. There were a few wonderful exceptions but they were in the minority. I choose to have elective c section for second birth. First birth they made me feel unsafe, were rude to DH and messed up my stitching resulting in emergency surgery due to blood loss. I wonder if the bar is very low to passing exams / midwifery course.

I had brilliant midwives in birth centre but local GP character that did some of the appointments was abhorrent.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/09/babies-nhs-staff-blame-culture

Misogyny? In some cases, surely.

I do wonder also about a potential scientific reason for some of this horrific behaviour. In the distant wild past, women generally had to resort to more passive-aggressive behaviours to ensure reproductive success.

I wonder if there are vestiges of this showing through when midwives act so unaccountably horribly- obviously it's no excuse, but there may be an element of subconscious evolutionary mechanisms which drive them to sabotage a perceived rival's reproductive experience.

I had almost forgotten about the night DS2 was born. He was unwell and taken to SCBU and I was put into a single room, as the staff very kindly thought it would be hard for me to go back to the post natal ward with no baby, and no idea when or if I would see him again. I’d had a c section and was in pain and catheterised, I was also hungry!
anyway there was no one available to bring me anything to eat as they didn’t know I would want anything 😳. I couldn’t walk anywhere and DH had gone home to look after DS1.
so I thought well never mind I’ll just sleep.
Ha! The midwives lounge or whatever was right beside my room, they had music playing loudly all night and were laughing and chatting at full volume. I got zero sleep and was absolutely beside myself by the time DH arrived in the morning with food. He did complain but it was far too late.
that was nearly 10 years ago and I’m still mad 😡 😂

Data from 2022–23 shows that over 800 babies may have been saved with better care in that year alone (source: Sands & Tommy's Joint Policy Unit)

Heartbreaking data from Sands.

I agree totally. I was in a ward and in huge pain and really felt I needed to push. I went to talk to the midwifes who were all chatting and laughing and they dismissed me without even checking me and told me to have a bath. I then got out of the bath and insisted they examined me and said I needed to go to the labour ward straight away..I then pushed for an hour and a half baby got stuck and I had to have an emergency c section. Awful experience and totally uncaring midwifes during a very vulnerable time in a women's life when they need reassurance not to be dismissed. This was 27 years ago and from the comments on this thread doesn't seem like things have improved!

And it’s such bad medicine to make people afraid or angry - completely counter productive.

Exactly my experience. On the 2 occasions when I’ve been sent (as an NHS patient) to private hospitals what struck me was the courtesy and kindness from staff. And no - there were no more of them on view than in NHS hospitals.

It costs nothing and it makes the world of difference.

@CinnamonCinnabar I don’t think midwives and doctors at all take their responsibility lightly, there won’t be one who hasn’t woken up at 3 in the morning hoping they’ve not missed anything or made the right decision. The decisions in maternity care are not as clear cut as people seem to think they are, it is often not obvious as to whether something is wrong or will actually be fine, so do you subject women to interventions which are unnecessary for 99.9% of them and in doing so become so overstretched that ironically more obvious issues get missed. The perfect example of this is when so many midwives are taken up caring for women having inductions due to a very negligible risk of waiting for them to go into labour themselves that next door in the maternity unit, another woman who hasn’t felt their baby move all day is waiting hours to be seen and then it ends up too late or a routine assessment in the antenatal clinic is so rushed that important things are missed. When midwives who had left the profession were last surveyed, it was nothing to do with pay as to why most had left, it was overwhelmingly the working conditions and being unable to give good care due to the ratio of staff to women & babies. As for not detecting a baby in the breech position, research has clearly shown that detecting a baby’s position via abdominal palpation is inaccurate, whomever the practitioner. I’ve detected quite a few breeches and other malpresentations but have also missed a couple of breeches too. The bottom of a breech baby in the pelvis does feel remarkably like a head in the pelvis, when I asked to first palpate a known breech as a student (lady waiting to go into theatre for planned caesarean) I was very surprised at how much the baby felt like a normal head down presentation, I have seen midwives with 30 years plus experience get it wrong too. Most of the women I refer for scan ? Breech turn out to have a head down presentation but the odd one does turn out to be breech. Personally I think all women should have a presentation scan at 36 weeks of pregnancy, however we struggle for scan slots as it is so it is obviously something which extra resources would be needed to implement. However the decision to change hospital policy to implement presentation scans for all women is not something the shop floor midwife has any influence over

They all seemed to be so dismissiveeof pain, mine said to me " you are in early labour and fussing about nothing, you have got at least 12 hours to go, you won't cope when the pain really gets going! I was in transition at this stage, shaking, feeling vomit rising in my throat but swallowing it because I thought that if I was actually sick she would hit me! I believed her that it was early labour because she was the professional and I had never had a baby before, she made me feel useless and pathetic. Another prize remark was "look at you, you can't cope with labour, how on earth are you going to cope with a baby?" In true transition style I said " I can't do this anymore, I want to go home" and she said "get off the bed and discharge yourself then" As I said in an earlier post I consented/was intimidated into having my labour accelerated and off she stomped to get the drip and while she was out of the room I went into second stage and started to push. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if they had put the drip in when I was already fully dilated, would they have checked before they did it and then not done it or would they just have done it and then would my womb have ruptured? I am always so grateful to my baby for coming when they did and sparing me unnecessary intervention

Also women need to complain and do it efficiently. My niece recorded the midwife who had previously sworn at her on the postnatal ward (when she was still completely immobilised and very vulnerable) telling my niece the next time she saw her that she and her baby were a ‘f-ing nuisance’. Such people have no business being employed in the NHS

The problem with the current NHS structure is that the patient has no or little choice. If patients could choose their provider - their doctor, their midwife as in other countries, they would be likely to choose those recommended by people they trusted and vote with their feet if they encountered someone unprofessional or unpleasant.

I’m lucky enough to have good private health insurance through work. I have been so shocked and depressed at how much better I have been treated than in the NHS particularly in gynaecology. It’s not even competence as such, just basic courtesy and kindness such as any decent human being would show another.

I have similar experiences. Female GP made out I was making a mountain out of a molehill when I wanted to get a full hysterectomy rather than fanny around with the Mirena coil to reduce heavy periods. I wasn't interested in getting one fitted only to find it did nothing for me. I would like a hysterectomy but apparently that's not possible. I will just carry on with strong painkillers instead. I need them for a different medical reason but will use them to ease the pain for periods as well. It's shocking how gynae care is treated by many male and female alike. Empathy bypass comes to mind!

Yep. It seems institutionally punitive. I’ve always thought if men were the ones to have babies, it would be soooo fucking different.
I’m sure Mumsnet had a campaign about this very subject a few years back. Can’t remember what came of it.

Superb post — really thought provoking. This has clarified a lot of things for me.

As a pp said, for most abdominal surgery you’d be mollycoddled (inappropriate word but you know what I mean) afterwards but somehow a c-section got her no special consideration at all. The combination of abdominal surgery with not only no rest or help AND. Immediately having the responsibility for a baby is nightmarish.

I often point out to my husband that women become accustomed to many unpleasant procedures being carried out with little or no pain or anxiety control and often little empathy from HCPs.

Misogyny must be at the bottom of this. Men simply wouldn’t put up with it, or (more importantly) be expected to put up with it.

And it’s certainly not just male practitioners- the ‘tough luck, it hurts and you’d better just put up with it’ attitude is widespread.

Apologies to the caring midwives and other professionals - of course not everyone is like this, but if you meet someone who is, especially at such a momentous time, it affects you deeply.

I have met one good MW when I gave birth to my 2nd child and she really did make me feel like she was interested in me and my welfare. She really did help me out in the small ways not just arrive for the main event. But the other MW’s I’ve had are as most people are describing on this thread, ranging from disinterested to actively unhelpful and making a bad situation worse. My first labour was horrible due to entirely just the midwives. They also had a very evil MW doing the stitching up who was actively rude to you at your most exposed, exhausted and vulnerable for daring to flinch or be uncomfortable being left in stirrups bleeding for 2 hours.

They were not interested in helping me to get breastfeeding either and I recall crying and feeling really afraid and upset being in the hospital after the birth

Ive had 2 vaginal births, and while nothing terrible happened, midwives were consistently rude, dismissive, infantilising, and uninformed. I dreaded every interaction with them. If pregnant friends ever ask for advice I always tell them to learn all they can about labour, birth, birthrights, because in all likelihood the midwives won't know anything.

I was lucky enough that both my labours were fast, so babies were born within 15 mins of arriving at hospital. But I had a midwife stitching me afterwards telling me it couldn't possibly hurt while I was screaming in pain (it was excruciating). Then threatening to take me to theatre if I didn't stop making such a fuss. I was vomiting in pain, but she was insistent it was impossible.

All midwives weirdly obsessed with induction, wouldn't stop offering it even before 40 weeks. I even got offered an induction when I called to say I was in labour with my second! Neither baby overdue, low risk pregnancies.

Even just typing these experiences (which are mild compared to other's stories) is bringing back those feelings of helplessness.