to think hospital treatment of pregnant women is pretty shit?

[TotorosOcarina]

Am basing this on my 1st birth in hospital and my treatment today (I had 2 homebirths and midwives who work in the community seem much better than hospital consultants!)

Firstly rang 'community midwives office' this morning as wee had tested + for some stuff ystay and woke up th reaa bad back ache and was advised on MN to get checked out as UTI could have spread to kidneys apparantly.

So call them and really snotty woman told me I need to ring triage, totally unfriendly and abrupt (how am i supposed to know who to ring first?!)
so ring triage. they say see GP.

So go to GP who says todays sample is 'glowing and riddled with allsorts'

i tell her I'm in pain around my back, she takes BP - its low.

She takes pulse, its high.

SHE says I have to go hospital to get checked out.

So I go, I wait, am seen by nice midwife wh does trace.

Then consultant comes in ....

Why are you here, she says - i explain.

why did you ahve a scan yesterday - i tell her they couldn't tell abbies position.

she then tells me I'm not in labour (erm i never said i was)

she tells me the pain im having is not my kidneys.

im not registering cx on the trace.

and asks me again WHY im there v

I then read my notes on way home and it says 'self refered from home' !!! - the bloody GP sent me!!

She made me feel like an idiot, like i was making the pain up - if it werent my kidneys and no cx - then why is my back absoloutly killing me on both sides?!

Just felt really stupid for doing as i was told by GP!

when dd2 was born, and taken off to scbu having been resuscitated, it took them 4 and a half hours to tell me if she was alive or not.

oddly, i couldn't eat my toast.

but i'd still rather an overworked system spent their time dealing with emergencies and saving lives. in an ideal world, they would have time to work on their bedside manner instead of spending their entire shift running from problem to problem. these days i tend to think that if they are ignoring you, they probably aren't that worried about whatever it is that you are fretting over. (they had had another two babies with serious life threatening conditions that they had to save first before they sat down and chatted to me, as it happened. i'm sure their parents were just as grateful as i was.)

why hadn't your boyfriend asked earlier or got you something? even in-patients don't get fed unless it's feeding time.

but anyway - yes, manners cost nothing, and we wish there was more money to put into the nhs. raise the taxes then.

i do think they do an amazing job in bloody awful circumstances. hopefully you won't need them for anything lifesaving, but ime they have always stepped up to the mark when it's been necessary.

Doctors love telling patients that the pain is all in their head - I don't know why. I suppose it's because it's so much easier to say 'patient is mental and imagining things' than actually bothering to make a diagnosis. Almost every single doctor I've ever met seems to think that all pain is imaginary until proven otherwise by some obvious evidence to the contrary e.g. patient limb hanging by a thread, gaping bullet wound, terminal cancer etc...

Pregnant women are automatically wrong about their own bodies because they are a.) female and b.) hormonal so clearly imagining 90% of their symptoms.

ummm trouble is it's a bit like that whispering game isn't it
easy to see how they get in a muddle! eeeks

TBH I'm guessing most of the people on here having a moan about the manners of the staff would be better off in a system like the one in France or Germany

My first pregnancy was managed very closely by my consultant.I was injecting blood thinners throughout, so the labour also had to be carefully planned.

My second pregnancy was IVF, so very precious to me. I still had all the same risk factors as with my first pregnancy and was again seeing the consultant regularly. At 35 weeks I visited the clinic, only to find that the consultant wasn't around and I had to see a registrar. He treated me as though I was stupid, that I didn't understand the medical conditions that I had been living with for years (and which he probably doesn't see much of, not being a rheumatologist). He said I was wasting their time and that I did not need to return to clinic - my MW would handle the rest of my pregnancy.

The thing that made me most cross was the idea that I wanted to be sitting around their minging clinic week after week - if I could have had a MW-led pregnancy I would have jumped at the chance but they told me it wasn't allowed.

Oh, and within 5 days I was admitted to hospital and was there on and off for the rest of my pregnancy [buangry].

Shall never forget being in labour with DS - on an open ward for 12 hours with children running up and down and midwives telling me I was making a fuss, was 1/2 cm dilated and needed to calm down. DH eventually read the riot act and demanded a doctor was called for a second opinion. I shall never forget the words - "this baby is posterior and this lady needs to be in a labour room, would you like me to organise an epidural for you". Funny how none of the experienced midwives noticed the baby's position and understood the potential for complications. The same doctor (a registrar called Zak) took charge of the last 30 mintues of the labour, insisted the M/w manager came in, sorted out a birthing stool, realised the cord was wrapped around the baby's neck and supported me through the final two pushes when the cord was cut with an emergency team on stand-by, forceps at the ready and got ds out before he died. Left to the midwives there woudl have been a tragedy.

I'm 40wks with dc3 and have had a difficult pregnancy. I cannot fault the treatment I have been given.

However it has made me realise that the treatment I had with ds when carrying him was shocking. Very much a "you're pregnant, deal with it" situation.

It doesn't matter whether you do/don't think you pay/should pay etc... You deserve the right to be properly diagnosed in a professional and courteous manner.

Sadly it extends to beyond pregnant women... I find the care very hit and miss generally. Unfortunately when not pregnant I suffer terribly with "womens problems" - the same problems which were picked up too late in my dsis and she is probably unable to conceive as a result.

I had mixed care.

Some of it was rubbish. They missed a reading suggestive of obstetric cholestasis that I was tested for at about 22 weeks pg which meant that on my due date there was a panic as it was discovered. I asked to switch midwives in community as she had been so dismissive of my complaints about severe itching - and then had a raft of them telling me how it wasn't their fault that the hospital hadn't told them and the hospital telling me they should have known while I FREAKED because of the risk of stillbirth.

In labour itself, they put in the synto drip something funny happened with my hand and it was EXTREMELY painful, it felt like there were shards of glass in my hand and I yelped. Just yelped, involuntarily. Midwife actually said to a colleague: "oh no, we're in for a screamer here" . I never yelped again and was pretty much silent through labour, but what a bloody attitude! It fucking hurt!

While being stitched in labour I needed to throw up and one of the staff was like: "come on, she's been in here x mins already, she can wait to throw up". Gee, thanks.

I was given my first VE by four different people, with all of them going on about how none of their fingers were long enough for my "weird passage".

The attitude of some of the staff was just bloody shocking. I wouldn't speak to a dog the way some of them spoke to me. And the casual lack of communication e.g. having a number of people looking at the fetal monitor saying "oooh that's suspicious" but never communicating anything directly.

I was very quiet and very passive in labour and would have jumped up and down if they asked, I wanted to be a "good girl". I can imagine that if you were NOT like this they would have been a hell of a lot worse.

There's no excuse for bad attitude!

Madwomanintheattic, I have no sympathy for the argument that staff are too busy to let women know where their babies are when there's an emergency.

A colleague had had 10 miscarriages and conceived via IVF and her baby was taken away with life-threatening complications post-labour. She was in a ward where women had babies and no one told her if her baby was even alive for 6 hours, her husband was sent home because of the hour etc.

That's just not good enough. I know staff are overworked, but it's not okay to leave people in that sort of situation unless, literally, people are going to die if you don't. And I just wonder if there was REALLY no one who could have popped in to her in that time.. no one taking a tea break or having a gossip etc.. I just wonder..

I've had one child and found the whole thing to be a conveyor belt system, I ended up having an emergency C-Section everything is fine until something happens, then you hit a brick wall of people who think they know better then your, think you are over reacting, think you are being difficult by wanting extra scans etc over the alloted ones even tho you are just doing/asking for exactly what it says in the books when things are not right.

It's no wonder we have such a high rate of stillbirths in this country IMO thats what happens when your have such a strict system that actively resents the idea of doing anything outside of the conveyor belt.

I have had - generally, aside from one Bitch Queen from Hell of a midwife - excellent care through the NHS.

BUT OP, I work for the NHS (not for any hospital I've ever had natal care with though, completely unrelated role!) and have had an experience of dealing with a patient who felt the doctor had been exceptionally rude to her. I listened to her story and had to agree - he'd been completely unprofessional and very rude. I gave her the contact details for our PALS office. She asked if I felt it was worth complaining.

It is ALWAYS worth contacting the PALS office in the hospital when a member of staff has behaved towards you as these have. PALS is the Patient Advice and Liaison Service and this is what they do, and it is their responsibility to pass on concerns such as yours to the department involved so that staff can be dealt with appropriately.

More succinctly: Ring the hospital switchboard (don't go through the department involved) and ask to speak to PALS. Register your complaint - if you wish you can remain anonymous, although I wouldn't advise it in these circumstances and ask for a written apology. Also suggest that they correct your notes: it is against the data protection act for your notes to contain inaccuracies such as 'self referred'.....

working, that is what happened to me. dd2 born with apgar of 1 (because she actually did just about have a detectable heart beat - only 28bpm) and taken off for resus. and they didn't let me know whenther she was alive or not for only 4 hours, so not 6. they didn't send dh home though.

and when they came back, they said other babies had 'gone off' as well, so they had been literally too busy. which given the state of both them, and the bursting at the seams scbu (where is spent the next 5 weeks and witnessed the work levels lol) i have no trouble at all beleiving.

and as they saved dd2's life (just about ) i choose to believe that they currently have to prioritise their work load.

but the original op really was just a miscommunication. the gp hadn't told the hospital, or the dept hadn't got the message.

sadly, i don't think even the second visit was that unusual. as a non emergency, you do rather fall down the pecking order a bit.

very sad. but pretty typical ime.

a bit like waiting 6 hours in a & e because you aren't actually going to bleed out, just have a broken arm. it's a pita, but y'know, i'd rather they worked as their triage dictates.

and on a 12 hour shift, if someone needs to grab half a cup of coffee before they discharge me, i don't even mind that. it might be the only thing saving them from collapsing themselves, or making a dodgy call in a real emergency situation an hour or two later.