...to think Maternity services really should be better by now?

[Qwertie]

My Dsis has just had her first baby. She had C-section after 12 hours of labour due to the baby not doing well as labour progressed. I went to see them today and heard a bit more about her experience. She had to be monitored continuously & was coerced on to the torture device (otherwise know as the bed). She wanted to stand even if she couldn't walk around. She was also made to stay on her back and repeated requests to turn over were refused. She was "examined" by approximately 5 people, without being asked for consent; with 2 of these being excruciating whole hand in. Not surprisingly after 12 hours the labour was not progressing, she was only 3cms, and the baby needed to come out by c-section. She then had to endure 2 nights on a horrible, aging hospital ward with the instruction to feed whenever she could as the baby's blood sugar was low, but without any help moving her from crib to bed, so she had to hold her all night & had no sleep. She is now home (thank goodness) where her dp can look after her.

I experienced similar to this with Ds1 19 years ago, but labour with dc3 3 years ago was so much better (still some problems, but I was able to disregard them). AIBU to expect better than this?

Both of mine were awful, natural labour with DD and CS with twins.
Both times were made awful due to being ignored and left alone for so long. The second time was due to the lack of midwife I was supposed to have in the HDU and almost bleeding to death of PPH and no one noticing. Truly awful experiences both down to lack of staff. There also seems to be a lack of humanity around its left without pain relief and to get up/lift baby out of cot when you've just had major surgery, no one wants to help you. If you'd had any other type of surgery you'd have proper pain relief and help from nurses. I'm pleased never to go through it again to be honest.

YANBU

If nothing else, hospitals are very dangerously understaffed. More are closing, putting even more pressure on the remaining ones. Women end up living 1 hour away from the nearest place, not great in case of sudden problems with your baby. I am in Greater London, it takes me 45mn at night to reach the nearest maternity unit.

(but apparently, we can find £369 million to refurbish Buckigham Palace)

The concept of communal wards is outrageous, patients being denied basic privacy and quiet, a young mum needs to rest, and privacy with their babies. Let's not even mention the public toilets, where your only choice is to drag your newborn baby with you.

Not having an anesthesiologist in birth centers mean women are denied the possibility of epidural, unless they move to the hospital. In some towns, they are not located next to each other.

There is next to no post-natal care in this country. You are being sent home within a few hours to free a bed (a small blessing when you know what hell the wards can be), but some new mums are too fragile and weak to be safely sent away. Then nothing, you can hope to find a place to check the baby weight in a crowded room, but anything else is a GP appointment.

The system is a disgrace. I could go on and on, it makes me so angry. We dare call ourselves a civilised country, it's disgusting. No wonder so many mums suffer with PND after being treated like cattle.

My observation on the put-up-and-shut-up attitude so many pregnant and post-natal mothers seem to be confronted with in the UK is that it comes from three sources: first, a sense of there not quite being enoutgh of anything to go round (sadly true, it seems) which leads to aggression against anyone consuming resources; second, a remnant of essentially class-based attitudes which suggest that anyone being given anything for 'free' (as some have mentioned) are supposed to be grateful and humble; and third, plain and simple misogyny. Women don't matter and a good woman puts up with whatever is done to her, smiles and is grateful, produces 'the lovely interesting baby' (as someone upthread said) and gets on with it.

After my CS I wasn't given any help in lifting my twins out of their cot. When I could finally get up lots of blood and matter fell out of me. I was horrified and scared and called for help and somebody came and called me a stupid girl. That was normalspparently.

After my C section, my premature baby was taken to NICU (as expected). However, despite being handed endless shiny leaflets emphasising the importance of skin to skin for bonding and expressing milk, I was not taken to see her for 28 hours after she was born. The reason being that I was on oxygen and so had to be accompanied by a midwife. None were free to take me as they were busy with other patients. Every time I asked, I was told "yes, I'll take you after I've dealt with x" but then something else would crop up.

Not seeing my baby wasn't life threatening, but it was very upsetting and of course I'll never get those early hours of her life back. I've struggled to breast feed as my milk has never really come in and I'm sure the fact that we were kept apart for so long has something to do with that.

At 38+5 I really shouldn't be reading this!

My experience was similar. I also had people wandering around the room and in and out of the room without introducing themselves so I didn't know who the hell they were.
I was put into stirrups, had repeated (whole hand) vaginal examinations and was told off for telling them to get their hands out of my body.
I ended up having an emergency C section.

My DD had a suspected infection and was taken to SCBU, I was left in a room all day away from her with my legs covered in blood and blood pooling on the sheet beneath me from 4am - 6pm.

Nobody came into the room the entire day, it wasn't until my Mum came to visit at 6pm and insisted someone help me down to the Special care unit to see my baby that someone bothered helping me in a wheelchair so my Mum could push me down.

At 8pm I was told to go for a shower and just left to get on with it alone.
I had to walk there and manage by myself in excruciating pain.

That night they buzzed me repeatedly to go down and breastfeed my DD. I walked down the long corridor there and back around 6 times every night as nobody would take me in a wheelchair.

A few times I'd have to stop and lean on the wall as I thought I was going to pass out.

This all happened 7 years ago now and I'm still upset by the experience.

I'll never have another baby again. It was horrendous.

middle that was my experience of a CS with twins as well it was awful.

I put in a formal complaint and they agreed that there had been many failings in my care and said they were resolved to learn from it.

The following year my friend had a baby at the same hospital and received the exact same treatment.

I am so angry about the whole thing.

It's disgusting.

YANBU. It really should be better by now. That's not to say MWs and HCPs don't do a fantastic job - they do, but provisions are woefully inadequate. IME there's zero BF knowledge in hospitals, staff are stretched painfully thin and what stands out for me is the way they shove you out the door like a bag of rubbish.

We have just gone through the most painful and physically exhausting thing we'll probably ever experience. So much of our body is damaged, no matter how you give birth. The concept of wanting to rest is sneered at, we're supposed to be mummy martyrs and yet apparently NHS reckons 6 hours post-birth and we'll be just grand. I could barely sit up let alone walk. Postnatal care is shocking, I strongly suspect if it were men who gave birth they'd have a NHS-funded 3 week spa break immediately after the birth and it would be illegal for women to do anything other than wait on them and and foot. IMO that is the crux of it - it's exclusively a women's problem therefore no one gives enough of a shit to make it better

Oh and if I had a quid for every time I heard "well baby is healthy that's what matters" (I had a 3rd degree tear, lost 3.5 pints of blood and had retained placenta so was very poorly post-birth) id be living in a mansion. Like seriously, whoever says this, go fuck yourselves. Am i not important too? Or am I just a vessel to deliver the next family addition and once I've done my job then my health and feelings don't matter?

I have two horrendous experiences to the point I can't face it again. dd is only just 2 and dd 7 weeks so very recent.

saying that I don't fault the midwives at our hospital, but our maternity hospital is absolutely being destroyed and they did the best they could.

YANBU. My booking-in midwife failed to flag up key parts in my medical history which led to the premature birth of my son at 20 weeks who died shortly after his birth.

I had been told "you fell through the cracks of the NHS" in subsequent meetings with the hospital.

AgainPlease that's terrible and I'm so very sorry for your poor baby and you. It sounds to me that you definitely should take it further, if you have the strength.

Thanks boomewang. To add insult to injury, it was an IVF pregnancy, so took us a while to get pregnant in the first place. We will be putting up a fight.

I'm just so sad that I only hear (and experience) bad things about maternity in the NHS in the 21st century!!

Hi, I have recently joined mumsnet. It's sad to see so many ppl had such bad experiences. Could you please also specify the hospital names where you have had these worst experience. So that it is a learning for other would be mums like me to be aware off. Thanks

Could any of this have been avoided with the use of a vocal birth partner? Am ttc and posts like this scare me enough to consider private maternity.

I've posted about my experience before, not as bad as some but bad enough.

My mun visited 6 hours post birth (she had been there for delivery) and I explained what had been going on.

She disappeared and came back with the ward sister (not sure if that's the right term, the boss) by the scruff of the neck and made me tell her. My mum is pushy and outspoken and impulsive and so many times I've hated it. Never again.

Anyway I got an apology and told that she wished everyone told her these things because she needed examples to improve training of known offenders. I thought that since my notes had literally nothing written in them post birth that must be indicative of lack of care! Apparently not.

I'm not traumatised or put of. Might have been the hormones but I got to thinking that an episiotomy without painkillers and sewn up without painkillers (not worse than actual delivery) meant I had nothing left to be scared of pain wise. What would a broken leg be now?

Rereading that was definitely hormones.

I had a terrible birth 5 years ago in a central London hospital. It won't be popular in here but my experience was definitely down to health tourism. (I wasn't born in the U.K. either before I'm accused of racism and 'earned' my NHS birth with 14 years worth of PAYE contributions) I'm not saying those babies should have been left to die, just telling it like it is. I am grateful that my DC and I lived to tell the tale but the Mark of someone who has had a truly awful time is that they only have one child. Never again. I live abroad now and a basic natural birth starts at GBP20k and most insurance doesn't cover birth. For a CS you will pay between GBP80-100k if no complications. That's the true cost of giving birth and why resources are so lacking in the UK.

Insist on a debrief when she's strong enough. I had one 3 years later. The "oh we don't do things like that now " bullshit they gave me was annoying (and incorrect, as I discovered!) but it was good to see them squirm after they had made me suffer. They apologised.