To think if 91 midwives from one trust are under Fitness to Practice proceedings there's a problem with the trust

Yes. See also failing councils and social workers.

Op, you seem to think "being a bitch" (your words) is totally unrelated to mistakes, delays, and omissions.

No.

The first leads directly to the next.

When you stop listening compassionately to your patients, when you dehumanise them, you cannot give them good clinical care.

If you're a midwife I really hope you stop and think about this.

Thankfully the NHS mostly recognises this. There is training about introducing yourself tk patiebts, explaining clinical decisions, addressing them by name and so on

And by the way I got a formal apology for all of those things. "Lessons were learnt."

So it wasn't just an eye roll. Yours truly, Bed fucking 44.

I think you're referring to my story. You don't get it at all. If you're a midwife I wonder if you're a tiny bit part of the culture I'm talking about.

The same midwives who rolled their eyes at me and called me Bed 44:

• didn't report it when I had a further haemorrhage, meaning I wasn't considered for a blood transfusion, with lasting consequences. I lost over 3 pints of blood.
• tried to give me medication I was allergic to, arguing with me about it "you've been prescribed it, are you saying the doctor made a mistake?!" [Yes, they had.]
• earlier in pregnancy, insisted I couldn't possibly have a UTI, refusing to send off a urine sample, meaning it went untreated and I nearly went into premature labour when it triggered very painful contractions at 28 weeks

Shall I go on? Or are you still sure that this is just a case of oversensitive mums fussing over an eye roll??!

Please, please tell me you don't work in midwifery op. You dont get it. And I have more examples.

I am one of the c2500 people who have given evidence to this enquiry. My experience dates back to 19 years ago and I’m classed as a near miss as thankfully my child was unharmed. As well as the catalogue of errors I experienced with the handling of my maternity care and subsequent birth and hospital stay, I also witnessed blatant racism towards two mothers on my ward (I’m white so this was not directed at me), which I reported in my evidence. I was so grateful to get out of there that I made the decision to stop at 2 children. I felt unsafe the entire time. What you are seeing in the press is the tip of the iceberg and when the report is published I think there is going to be a torrent of horror coming out. This has been going on for decades.

We could have a better system if we had widespread insurance and a small fee for hospital and doctors appointments, who would have thought!

I don’t know what it is with giving birth but there is a general disregard for mothers. Much of this from staff. It’s crazy how you are treated whilst giving birth/after vs having a routine procedure on another part of your body.

Having the misfortune to have a chronically ill child and loads of hospital admissions, I found any NHS service focused on caring for women to be generally very poorly run and staff who just didn't seem to care. Post natal was far and away the worst, but peads comes close behind. Any peads ward will usually have 90% mums with their child.

Having now moved to Ireland I'm amazed at the differences in care and attention to detail. I don't know if its understaffed, poor hiring or poor practice, but NHS care isn't fit for purpose too often.

Yeah, these types of practitioner tend to be neglectful because they refuse to listen to patients. They're also arrogant and this again leads to mistakes by omissions. They often get away with it because other, more conscientious workers will often deal with these omissions thus concealing mistakes. If you get a critical mass of shit workers then mistakes and omissions are revealed.

I was a midwife for 17yrs plus the 3yrs training. On both a personal and professional level, I have experienced the very best and the very worst of staff. Midwifery has the potential for so much good but poor care really does ruin lives.
My feeling is that maternity is run like a conveyer belt, getting people in and out and moving onto the next family. This doesn’t allow for good care, proper relationships or the solving of problems. When I trained, it wouldn’t have been acceptable to not offer a Caesarian section mum a bed bath, tea and toast, help with feeding etc before going up to postnatal. Now it’s up as soon as possible.

There is a huge pressure on beds and moving people through the system. I’ll always remember being told to get women up at 7.30am and out asap (they’d only given birth overnight) as delivery suite was full of women needing to come to and women waiting to come in from triage. I felt absolutely awful doing that but what could be done?

There used to be lots of small community units where women could come to stay for recovery. I even remember newly released from scbu twins coming with their mother at 60 days old for ‘fattening’ before going home! I was able to give far better care in these units than when I had 12 mums and 12 babies to look after on a ward. Even the little things like making hot chocolate in the late evening and bedding everyone down.

The system needs to change so that more midwives can be good at their job and not burnt out. More midwives would then join and the bad ones more easily weeded out.

I wonder if there is also an element of the inverse.

I’m not excusing midwives being actively unkind but I think there is a perception that that female HCPs always have to be motherly whereas male staff don’t.

My ex was a nurse and he was very blunt but he was respected for it. Barring clinical negligence, I wonder how much that is considered “unkind” would have been acceptable if a man did it.

I'd say it's more that if there is a culture of disrespect or unkindness towards patients, especially if borne of misogyny, then that is the coal face experience of the patients. Things they will be aware of. Not necessarily the subject of the FTP concerns.

Eg that culture will also manifest in being dismissive of women's concerns, fears about the babies' health/well being, their own health concerns.

It won't be because Sally rolled her eyes at the woman in bed 4 but it might be that the same attitude which caused Sally to roll her eyes at the woman in bed 4 also meant she ignored bed 4s concerns or just didn't do something she should have done.

Without wanting to detract from the thread, I'm not sure that 91 midwives are undergoing fitness to practise investigations, but more likely that 91 cases are being investigated by FTP investigations. Often a FTP investigation about a single HCP will involve multiple different allegations, so this could be a handful of midwives with many cases each where they are alleged to have failed to meet required standards of care.

I had my first two babies at QMC in Nottingham in the early 00s. Met some nice caring individuals and some downright nasty ones. I will always remember one of them shouting at me when my baby was a few hours old and making me cry. I had terrible PND and this definitely contributed.

Some of the worst experiences of my life were on maternity wards. Utterly unnecessary and dehumanising. Why aren't we on the streets protesting?? Chained to the hospitals??

Previous Ockenden reviews have found some instances of midwives not involving doctors when they should've, so it's possible those might be some of the delays and omissions.

I've given birth 9 times and had 5 miscarriages. I've met good and bad midwives; some lovely ones and some good damn horrid ones! However, when it comes to doctors the women ones have been universally absolutely awful. The men have always listened and been led by my own preferences. The women have been obstructive, rude, belittling and resistant.

I have two (ex) midwives in my close social circle. Both committed, professional people who were dedicated to their vocation. Both have left midwifery in the last 18 months citing unworkable conditions and genuine fear that their jobs were untenable and unsafe.

Interesting it's the female midwives being thrown under the bus....I don't see anything about any doctors being held to account!

The thing is, the doctors have way less of an opportunity to be dickheads to you on the postnatal ward or when in labour. They do a ward round, you spend maybe 3mins talking to one.

I think a dehumanising culture can spread too.

After my first birth I had lost a huge amount of blood and got sepsis. I could barely sit up without feeling faint. I asked a midwife for some stronger pain relief and I heard her saying to a colleague "Bed 44 wants morphine" and the other midwife just tutted and I had to ask again later.

Firstly, I have a fucking name, or at least call me "the woman/mum on bed 44".

(Secondly, I was so so ill, just have a bit of compassion ffs.)

But if dept policy is to refer to real life injured women by their bed numbers, is it any wonder they forget we're real people?

I do have some really lovely stories of seriously kind and compassionate midwives too.

I'd want to know if it has anything to do with the culture there, as well as issues of resourcing that you mention OP. There are other examples of Trusts in the NHS having problems stemming from inappropriate pushing of natural childbirth ideology.

To answer OP, yes there are often systemic problems in a hospital Trust that will result in poor patient care. The blame however will always be put on clinical staff, there are various historical examples of that. It’s almost unheard of for the CEO or senior management to be held accountable. But the rot always starts from the top.

Certain professions (paramedics) are recognised as being more likely to be referred to the HCPC but only as likely as other professions to be reprimanded.

So it may be a similar situation with midwife's /NMC currently due to the entire service being under massive scrutiny from government, media and public. You'd need to see the outcomes of all 91 of these cases to see if they were even fair referrals in the first place.