What’s the most unhinged/blatantly untrue thing you’ve been told by a health visitor?

[claudiawinklemansfringetrimmer]

Inspired by the health visitor who confidently told me yesterday that “Pom bears have more saturated fat than a Big Mac” and the ones on a birth preparation course who stated “breast fed babies are 70% more intelligent” and “they didn’t have formula in dinosaur times!” (The latter is technically true I suppose…)

With the greatest respect, my story is not made up bullshit and many of the names on this thread have been on MNet since it were fields.

I made a formal complaint at the time and it was upheld by the community health Trust. In my experience, the HV and her boss were so poor that the fact they may have been responsible for vulnerable families is a significant worry.

If you are in doubt, I'm sure you could look up an article interviewing the Chair of HV Association, circa sprin 1996. The woman claimed HV's were responsible for teaching ignorant mothers the three c's. Cooking, Communication and Cleanliness. If that was the view of the Chair of your esteemed association, God help infants.

What is reprehensible is the lack of transparency over the role and the fact that it is not made clear that whilst statutorily every family must be offered a HV, there is no statutory obligation to accept their services. The threat of SS is dangled to readily and it is simply not acceptable.

Finally if the state wanted me to engage with a health visitor all they needed to do was to provide an intelligent, well informed, respectful, experienced and spotless individual who was able to tell the time and therefore turn up on time.

My health visitor blamed everything - DS crying, not sleeping, unsettled - on the fact that he was breastfed. She was the same with my friends when they asked her for advice with their babies. She just didn't trust breastfeeding.

My midwife recommended Guinness and chocolate for the iron. That's the sort of advice I like!

Oh brilliant, another HV bashing thread.

I do believe you are right with this but we have never had a diagnosis or even support from the dietician. Once we got the ASC diagnosis, although it was then Asperger’s, it was very much a this is why then, case closed and off you go.

I don’t use Facebook but I will ask DD to find the group so I can have a look, thank you.

My little sister was a very premature, sick baby 35 years ago and apparently the HV told my mother that she would have died if she'd been born to parents who lived in a council house (rather than our mortagaed semi-detached house in suburbia). I never knew if the HV really said that or my mum made it up.

@MadgeHawthorne I've just looked up the HV salary which ranges from £32k up to £50k. I'll use £40k as the average. There are about 7000 HV's in the UK - thankfully far fewer than when my first was born 30 years ago when the Higher numbers were not extrapolating to high standards of service.

It isn't a difficult sum and the cost to the UK is £294million every year.

That's a national scandal in my opinion and those funds should be diverted towards the most vulnerable.

I’d like to defend health visitors - or at least the one who saved my daughter’s life fourteen and half years ago.

8 days after my daughter was born, she wasn’t feeding properly and hadn’t for a couple of days. I was in a post-natal fog and somehow managed to convince myself that there was nothing I could do; it was a shame, but that just was how it was.
Something made me ring the health visitor - I can still remember that her name was Bev - and she listened really attentively to what I was saying. She calmly told me that she was ringing an ambulance for us.

The paramedics arrived just a few minutes later, and when they put the oxygen mask onto my tiny daughter’s face, her whole body turned from grey to pink within moments. We were taken to hospital where my daughter was treated for bronchiolitis (and I got help for my PND too).

There may be some bad HVs out there, but there are some amazing ones too. Bev listened, realised I was not OK and that my baby was also really not OK, and got help immediately.

My health visitor and subsequent GP at the 6 week check told me my baby was perfectly healthy and had a touch of reflux.. he ended up in hospital with sepsis the following day.. 🙄

No, but mine was 23. Fact. I believe that has recently been changed and they can't now qualify before 24 as they now have to have a specified period of practice post nursing qual. That didn't used to be so.

There is something in this. Smoking does stimulate peristalsis so helps prevent constipation. However there are better ways to keep the bowel healthy....

I think people are entitled to feed a child however they like - but it is completely normal for an exclusively breastfed baby to need feeding every 20 mins for the first weeks/months (and sometimes longer) as supply is established. I think there are a lot of myths about breastfeeding that make it more difficult for some people to establish supply. I do completely know how hard early bf is, but it baffles me when people say things like this about it, as if babies don’t just feed constantly….

Sorry how can you read some of these stories about the genuinely hurtful way women have been talked to and often shamed by health visitors and produce this response? I have no doubt that there are some great ones out there somewhere but given mine and other people’s experiences there are clearly far too many that are failing women at a vulnerable point in their life.

On my end, ”Breastfed babies are 70% more intelligent” and “they didn’t have formula in dinosaur times” are funny examples, but they also speak to a culture of healthcare workers who will absolutely batter a woman into breastfeeding no matter the cost and it absolutely wrecked me when I failed to breastfeed my DD.

The one who visited after the birth was useless. However, the one who came for a pre-birth home visit was amazing.

All the women in my family had a tough time with breastfeeding so I was a bit worried and prepared to formula feed. She gave me a rather scientific explanation of how breastfeeding works, including a hand drawn diagram, where things can go wrong and some alternative suggestions for increasing milk supply. At the same time there was no pressure that I absolutely need to breastfeed.

The second big topic was recognising PND and discussing what kind of support network I have. She said that people will surprise me in both positive and negative ways and I should be mentally ready for that. Turned out to be one of the best advice I ever got as a first time mum.

Completely agree with @claudiawinklemansfringetrimmer . However, when my HV's boss told me that the role of my hv was to make sure I talked to my baby enough for him to develop speech, I was incensed enough to read him the Illiad and the Odyssey aged about six weeks. He grew up with a love of Greek and Roman mythology and brought me home a first in Classics from Oxford. (So there @MadgeHawthorne ).

His PhD was about the impact of mythology on more modern Philosophers and he worked it up into his first published monograph. Perhaps the HV can bear some credit 😀.

Well then the answer is to focus help on those who want and need that help and put more money into quality training for HVs.

My experience was shockingly bad including dangerously bad breastfeed advice from the first HV (who had never breastfed and was early 20s but insisted the trained breastfeeding counsellor was wrong). The second insisted that I was legally required to see an HV along with more bad breastfeeding advice, an admonition out of nowhere that tea towels should be washed daily (they were clean every day as she could see for herself) and that I should look for a “nice little part time job, possibly at Sainsburys, for the good of the baby (I was the main earner, I have a STEM PhD) because working mothers were more likely to have delinquent children.

Both sets of comments were wrapped up in condescending casual racism.

I also put in a complaint after having called to verify the legal claim and was subsequently told that “breastfeeding training” would be offered and that the casual racism was “not intended”.

I parted company with the service, somehow managed to raise and feed four DC successfully without them.

Feel free to assume its made up but the inability to acknowledge problems and deal with them is part of the problem many women experience with the service. I don’t doubt there are committed and effective HVs, unfortunately all the experiences around me at the time and since ranged from mediocre to downright poor. My community midwife team OTOH were brilliant and provided genuine support and advice. The contrast was stark.

When I mentioned to the HV I was starting weaning with a small amount of puréed veg, she pulled a face and said, “Poor little thing, who’d want to eat that? At least give him something with a bit of sugar in it.” OK Barbara 🙄. Shockingly ignorant advice I’m sure she’d been dishing up to new mums for decades.

There were also no babies in dinosaur times because there were no humans!

All the health visitors and midwives I saw were utterly useless unfortunately.

That three year olds aren't advanced enough to be manipulative. 😁😂

Years ago I was advised by an HV to treat mastitis with cabbage leaves in my bra and to keep on feeding.

Later that day I was admitted to hospital with suspected sepsis (luckily it wasn’t sepsis!) and spent three nights in hospital on antibiotics IV for an infected absyss in my breast.

I wouldn’t mind, but she’d seen me delirious and weeping with the pain and she’d seen my breasts - massively swollen, inflamed, leaking blood - and must have realised it was past the point of ‘cabbage leaves and stop moaning’.

When I said 2yo DD was still breastfed, the hv screeched "you MUSTN'T" and went on to explain that it wasn't fair on DH.

Maybe if they were better trained, these threads wouldn’t exist. I genuinely don’t know what the HVs were for. Anytime I rang the helpline to ask a question (even questions that the NHS website said to speak to your HV about) they’d just say to speak to the GP. One time I broke down completely and told my HV that I was suicidal due to PND. She told me to give her a call in a week once the phase had passed. That was it.

And with DD2, the HV said that she couldn’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t breastfeed, and how could they not do what was best for their baby?? You can think it’s made up bullshit if you like. But it’s absolutely what she said.

(I did point out that dh was fully weaned and therefore it was just fine)

Your defensive and insulting first paragraph sums up precisely what’s wrong with service providers that refuse to listen to the concerns and experiences of the people they’re there to help.

I’m sorry if you feel your profession is taking a bashing here, but suggesting that women who’ve had bad experiences with HVs are not be believed and are just making stuff up for shits and giggles is highly offensive.