To think post natal wards are absolute shit?

[SprogletsMum]

I had ds2 this morning and have been put onto a full 4 bay ward.

2 of the 3 other women have been quiet most of the day but one keeps ringing people all day long. There has not been a single minute of quiet all day.
I've been awake since 1am and I'm shattered but she just won't shut up.
I'm going home to the other 3 dc for some peace and quiet as soon as ds2s 12 hours of obs are up.

I was in 3 nights in 2014 as my BP wouldn't come down after pre-eclampsia.

Roasting hot, gross toilet, loud, terrible food (a highlight was a tuna and sweetcorn sandwich with ONE PIECE OF SWEETCORN oh so yummy). Also one woman making calls all night the first night I was there. She would alternate calls between buzzing the midwives asking why her brand new baby was crying, then acting surprised when it was suggested she pick her up and feed her or cuddle her.

DS was fine and I felt so guilty as I was the reason we were in there. Midwives were generally nice, although they didn't have time to spend long with anyone. I'm due in 2 weeks and hoping not to spend much/any time on there.

I have had 2 emergency sections. Care during delivery was excellent, but care on post natal ward was shocking. Morning after delivering dd 1 they came up to me and told me to go make myself some breakfast at the other end of the ward. I couldn't even get out of bed by myself never mind make breakfast and carry a tray back. With dd2 I had a massive bleed after the section and required a blood transfusion in the high dependency unit. At 10 am the following day I was concerned because the bleeding had started to increase again, and my wound had also started to bleed. I informed the midwife immediately because I was really worried, it was 3pm before she checked me over. I demanded to be discharged as soon as I could walk! It was also noisy and far too hot.

2 and a half frigging weeks with DS2...the staff were lovely but I was stir crazy by the end. The space was the length of the bed and another 2-3 ft at the side. I'm sure prisoners get more space

Oh and I wont forget cheese gate..

I was Diabetic so had cheese and biscuits instead of a pudding...several times I went for my dinner only to find no cheese. The servers said they only bring up what's allocated so no spare.

I then found out some twat was pinching my cheese as she thought the cheese portion too small.. I could of killed her for that piece of cheese

Things have certainly changed since I had mine in the 70s. 4 to a ward, no curtains round, we had a great time. Visitors, husbands only for an hour in the afternoon, then only 2 visitors in the evening for another hour. The babies were taken away each afternoon to the nursery so that we could have a sleep. No mobile phones obviously, so really peaceful apart from babies crying now and again. I was in for 8 days as we all were.

Not at all, with my 1st 2 I was lucky and managed to wangle single rooms. With dd I ended up in a 4 bay room, the other two ladies were lovely but put in the corner were the 'chavtastics'! She would stay up until 2am on the phone, fall asleep with the loudest snoring that would put an elephant to shame and then moan at 6am that the other newborns woke her up 😈 her 4 kids ran riot up and down the ward and then when I had a headache and the nurse turned my light off she moaned it was too dark and came and switched it back on. If I had to stay another night I would have paid good money for a different bed!

This brought back so many bad flashbacks for me. I think fondly of the actual birth but not the war zone that was the post-natal ward. It was a shared ward so you had women who had given birth, together with those being induced (horrific for them from what I wit) and those who were experiencing problems with their pregnancy. It was in no way supportive, or a cared for environment. I was in for 5 days and I saw so much that was sub-standard if not downright appalling. I wanted to complain so badly but I didn't have the energy post birth and time just went on and i had other things to get on with (which is why they get away with treating us so shoddily IMO).

You are always going to struggle with privacy and sleep, for example. No NHS trust will ever have the budget to provided solely individual rooms.

The hospital where I gave birth had individual rooms for everything except ICU/HDU and... postnatal.

I could have coped a lot easier with being on a shared bay, though, if they'd limited visiting hours more so patients could get some rest. Or limited visitor numbers (was supposed to be 2 at a time, but wasn't). I've been on surgical wards before in shared bays and it's been fine - but I didn't have to share those bays with 48 noisy visitors with loud toddlers and a swarm of helium balloons all day, on top of the other patients and staff.

Two nights in labour followed by two more nights post-EMCS when I couldn't sleep either because the baby fed all night and the ward was like a rush hour station all day. I was hallucinating from the lack of sleep. It should not be too much to ask that recovering patients get a chance to rest. I'd have had that if I'd had any other kind of surgery!

My first was 23 years ago in a maternity hospital - it was ace, in for 5 days, visiting hours strictly adhered to, only dp's for evening, good food , very clean, baby taken off you for 6 hours overnight and just returned for feeds if you so wished. 2nd dc was maternity unit in a large hospital, busy, unorganized, crap food , visitors staying til late at night, understaffed. Awful

Mine was OK, but we were in for the best part of two weeks, first for my blood pressure that stubbornly refused to go down then with DS because of his weight loss - which was probably due to them getting his weight wrong at least once, as one day they were very concerned that he wasn't putting weight on fast enough and talking about trying formula the next day they were discharging us and the figures did not add up. Most of the staff were lovely, but that sort of thing didn't exactly inspire confidence.

All the staff acted very surprised as well if I got tearful or expressed any wish to go home.

Place was mostly clean though. Other people's visitors could be annoying, particularly the ones next to me who kept encroaching on my space. Staff were mostly lovely a noticeable exception being a SCBU nurse who seemed to take against me instantly and made my first visits to DS a bit upsetting.

Great news about the upcoming campaign, MNHQ

I also had a baby in SCBU, so had to endure everyone else's babies without having my own by my side. I missed meals because I was in SCBU with my baby (I apparently shoudl have "known" that it was lunch time at 11am). I received zero medical attention until DH kicked up a fuss, because I wasn't in the ward when any medical staff did their rounds - apparently being down the corridor in SCBU with my poorly, preemie baby was something that their standard processes didn't acknowledge. On the postnatal ward I was treated like a silly girl who was just getting in their way, not a first time mother who was somewhat traumatized by an unexpectedly early delivery. I am so grateful that medically speaking everything was straightforward and I had no ongoing issues - but they didn't know that until they checked me. And they didn't even bother to ask me how my baby was, or even what his name was.

I propose turning all heating down in NHS buildings by three degrees, and saving billions of pounds in wasted energy. NHS, you can have that suggestion for free, you are welcome.

In contrast, the lovely nurses in SCBU were wonderful, I cannot say enough good stuff about them. It was one of those lovely ladies who got bf established so that we could go home and DS would continue to thrive. It did restore my faith a little, as if they can do it with everything that goes on in a high dependency unit surely it's possible in a "normal" post natal ward?

I had a c/s, our son was 11 weeks early so rushed to NICU, it was touch & go whether he was big enough to survive. I was given my own room, in the corner of the postnatal ward. I was told it was so I wouldn't get upset by the other mums (1) having their babies with them and (2) seeing them come & go whilst I was still there - I stayed in for two weeks due to the wound re-opening slightly.

I cannot fault the ward or the care I received, it was fantastic. Spotless. My main complaint was that there was no television, because the hospital had only opened a couple of months prior and the telly units hadn't been fitted!

The hospital I had my son at had brilliant staff, but we're obviously overstretched. I only had one midwife at my birth, and they had to close the ward to new patients and divert women to a hospital 20 miles away.

The post natal ward was dark, crowded, and hellishly hot. They had strict visiting hours and rules (only two visitors, no children unless a sibling to the baby) , but no one to enforce them. Most people stuck to them, but one woman had five adults around her and a load of kids running riot (who were cousins).

We ended up being readmitted as my son had jaundice, but we had a side room. Completely different experience, a lot less tense and I actually got a little sleep.

The staff were utterly, utterly amazing though.

I keep failing to post properly on here because 3 week old DD is being clingy. But. We had some lovely people. There was an amazing paeds doctor who was really calm with me and explained everything, and wasn't remotely fazed that he was dealing with a baby with two mums. Likewise an amazing nurse when our baby was on a special care unit.

OTOH the lows included a surgeon who refused to listen to anything and badly misunderstood what DP was consenting to, and (for me) the arsey woman on the postnatal ward who literally yelled at me for trying to get food for DP while she was bedbound, because she was incapable of understanding that my partner, a woman who had recently had a baby and had had a c-section, was not a man. And spent ages yelling at me that 'he' wasn't entitled to food. Then told me I was 'sensitive' for getting angry.

We're also thrilled to realise that they 'forgot' to prescribe DP iron, which should have happened, with the result she's been severely anaemic, which might be why she is exhausted and DD has been losing weight steadily.

Other hospital wards are no better either. They are some of the worst places to be ill or recovering in. Get out as fast you can and be thankful if you don't need nursing - because there is little chance of it - at least on the cardiology and emergency wards I have been on!
Its not the fault of the staff: too few and too overworked.

Oh, forgot another thing. DD was tube fed as she picked up an infection and wasn't eating. We were told to do the tube feeds ourselves, and that we should test her stomach fluid before each feed to see how acid it was. But, DP was also told to try to breastfeed on demand (by a different set of nurses), and they agreed that, if DD had just breastfed, we'd be testing milk from the stomach, not acid.

So they said, don't bother testing.

Only found out days later, when DD was on the special care ward, that you test because if the tube is in the wrong place, and you tube feed them, you can kill them.

Nice that no one thought it was important enough to make sure we understood that, huh? Especially nice that we were actively told not to bother to check.

One memory that keeps returning today was sitting in SCBU having only recently met my baby. My parents came to see us (I had sent my husband home to have a shower and proper food!). Within 10mins of them meeting my baby I had a shitty phone call telling me my dinner was waiting and I had to return to my room.

My baby was taken off me, I was sent away and made to walk back alone having been forgotten about for pain relief. This was the afternoon after a middle of night emergency section.

I'll never forget sitting sobbing over a cold lasagne completely alone.

I'm still so angry about the care and it haunts me every day still.

Christ, these accounts are horrendous.

LRD I know via an academic link online that you've posted a very vivid and moving account of what happened to you, your partner and your baby.

Would you mind if I linked it here? Or linked it on the forthcoming MN Campaign thread?

Yup. I hated being in hospital after DD1. It's the main reason I opted for a home birth with DD2.

But compared to some of the posts on here I had it quite good I think

I just found a complete lack of information. I was in over a bank holiday weekend, they were so understaffed but the staff that they did have, to be fair, were (mostly) lovely. But just little things like getting told to buzz if you need help but not getting told where the buzzer is (and then when I found it it didn't work!), not being told what to do at mealtimes, what to do with your baby when you need the loo... etc.

Plus the noise, the heat, the other patients (the woman next to me with 3 other kids who kept peeping through my curtains ), those fucking stupid plastic boxes your baby is meant to sleep in... ughhh. The worst.

I've had very different experiences with my two DDs at different hospitals.

With DD1 the ward was awful - crowded, noisy and if I pulled the curtain round for privacy it was dark as my bed seemed squeezed into the corner. Bathroom was filthy. The food was terrible so DH had to bring me supplies. The staff were variable and I can still remember the unpleasant midwife who made me cry in the middle of my first night. No-one helped me bf or gave me advice re dealing with my jaundiced DD. It was a complete shock after a fairly traumatic birth ending in theatre but where the midwife and doctors were all caring and professional. When I was discharged they didn't do the paperwork properly and so I wasn't on the community midwife's list for a visit and had to chase that up.

Completely different story with DD2 - the ward was a room with 2 beds and the other woman was discharged shortly after I was moved there so I had the room and bathroom to myself. It had big windows which although looked onto another part of the hospital did mean I had natural light. The staff were all very good - they checked on us, made sure bf was established and went through everything with me before I was discharged (paperwork all done properly!). DH could have stayed the night if he'd wanted but he went home to look after DD1 so actually I had a quiet and restful night (as much is possible with a newborn!). Even the food was ok so I actually don't have any complaints about it at all.

liney - go for it. Only caveat is that it's about what happened to me, as the non-birth mum.

Most of my issues were due to patients and their visitors rather than the hospital.
It was boiling but to be fair to the HCA's and midwives they kept telling anyone who listened it was hotter if everyone kept their curtains closed but of course nobody listened. I was on the same ward in a heatwave in August but was the only one in and it was really cool.

Highlights for me were the blood and vomit covered toilet - this was where the breakfast trolley was left every morning (not that anyone told me breakfast was self serve!)
The food was just indescribably bad - stale sandwiches and luke warm pasta
🤢
The night staff were frankly abusive
I can't list everything they did to me and my baby as I will not sleep tonight if I do but I did eventually have a de brief years later and it was admitted our care was "sub optimal"
It was also noted my notes were at
Times a complete work of fiction
I will never forgive those staff
Ever
I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire

(I had ds2 at a different hospital - begged for a home birth but was ignored - and I was out within 9 hours. No way IN HELL was i going on a post natal ward again.)