AIBU to think that all mothers should have food and water on postnatal wards?

[JustineMumsnet]

Hello,

Today, we at MNHQ are launching a new campaign called Better Postnatal Care: Aftercare, not Afterthought.

Over the years, we’ve been struck by how many MNers have related pretty horrible experiences on postnatal wards. We’ve also seen lots of discussions about longer term aspects of postnatal care: help with breast or bottle feeding, mental health care for new mothers, wound care after difficult births, and physio for women who feel they need it (but rarely feel able to ask for it) - among other things.

So, towards the end of last year we decided to see if we could do something about it. We ran a big survey of Mumsnet users’ experiences of postnatal care, and some of the results were striking. (You can see more here.) Among those who stayed in hospital after giving birth - which was most new mums - many reported that it was sometimes difficult to access food, pain relief, drinking water and washing facilities. 61% had been unable to access food when they needed it; 45% had been unable to access pain relief when they needed it; 22% had been unable to access water when they needed it; and 19% had been unable to access washing facilities when they needed them.

So today, we are asking the major UK political parties to commit, in their manifestos for the general election, to making sure that women on postnatal wards always have access to the absolute basics: food, water, pain relief and washing facilities.

We’re also asking everyone (this means you!) to contribute ideas about how we can make postnatal wards ‘fit for purpose’. More midwives? A fridge full of sandwiches, fruit and water on every ward? Asking all visitors and patients to turn off noises on their phones and personal devices? Maternity support assistants? Welcome cards by every bed explaining how the ward works? Making sure that inpatients and their visitors use headphones if they’re watching TV? We’re after all your suggestions, no matter how small. We’ll also be asking for input from healthcare workers with frontline experience - so if you’re one of those, please do chip in.

This isn’t about going into battle with people who work in maternity services in the NHS. Most of you feel that overall, over the year or so post-birth, standards of postnatal care are good or OK. When asked what needs to change, many of you say you think there should be more staff. Some of you had very good experiences: if you look at the ‘Good Stuff’ heading on this page you’ll see some shout-outs to hospitals and services that MNers say are getting things right. So we know that it can be done. What we want to do is find out how these hospitals are managing to get it right, and see if the lessons can be transferred.

In the months to come, the campaign will look in more detail at things like infant feeding, traumatic births, postnatal mental health, and follow-up care for birth injuries.

Please get involved with the campaign. Here are some ways you can help.

And as ever - do let us know what you think!

Thanks

@CherriesInTheSnow sorry but postnatal wards are awful places. They are not fit for recuperation and care of the average postnatal woman.
If a woman cannot manage without her partner there constantly after she has given birth, then yes, to me that needs flagging up and accommodating to support her but also to ensure that other women who don't but who are also still entitled to privacy, peace and dignity don't suffer.
By accommodate I mean more private rooms where the fact a man staying 24/7 doesn't piss off the other women in the room which it does I can assure you,

Sorry if you think I'm being horrible, but I think you're being way too over sensitive.

Professional, competent and flexible care means exactly what I have alluded to above.

But if PN wards were not such horrible places then not so many women would feel completely overwhelmed.

I'm sorry but I don't think I am being over sensitive. It is not fair when care is so awful on both a practical and emotional level, to subject a woman to that and then blame her and label her as "unable to cope". It does not need flagging up as a separate process. It needs simple conpassion and improvement of the standard services.

@CherriesInTheSnow incidentally, most of us leave PN wards feeling vulnerable, knackered and let down. Other Mental Health issues aside.

I am dreading being in again in November. Some examples of what I endured from other women's "partners" visiting were

• arguments

-threats of physical violence

• appalling language
• constant noise and arguing on the phone
• my curtain being caught and pulled several times whilst I was on a drip and only wearing a bra
• my bedside chair being taken without asking
• someone's boyfriend coming in because they'd run of electricity and he wanted to watch the tv. I kid you not
• hordes of screaming children milling around a bed and crawling under the curtains whilst I was attempting to breastfeed an hours old baby
• someone's partner having the temerity to knock on the postnatal ward bathroom and should "are you going to be much longer in there?" whilst I was in agony trying to pass urine and bleeding all over the floor.

Why shouldn't I want a bit more privacy. Is it right that I pay the price for basically shit clinical care and the fact that some women want their OH the entire time??.

Also overnight visitors don't need to be antisocial to be noisy. My DH is lovely, but if he'd been sleeping on a chair next to me he'd have been snoring like a steam train.

Something else that would have made a big difference to me is sidecar cots attached to the bed, rather than babies in those fishtanks. Some hospitals have these but they're not widespread. Would have made a big difference to me post-CS, and would have meant staff wouldn't have needed to be back and forth passing my baby over to me either.

Yes, absolutely a basic necessity, though I imagine this would be more difficult for a third world country!

@Cherries If you can't manage without your partner then sorry but you are unable to cope and need extra assistance. If ON wards were better then 95% of women would quite happily have restricted visiting hours for partners and be looked after properly my midwives and HCAs I suspect. I certainly didn't want my DH there 24/7. And actually he felt a bit in the way with these women trying to get over having had babies and being exhausted. He didn't stay as long as he could.

You seem to ignore the fact that I'm not saying you shouldn't have that need met - you absolutely should - merely that it's not fair that I am subject to sharing a ward with a strange man at my most vulnerable too.

I just told some friends abroad about a campaign to get water and food on a hospital ward, in the UK. They are flabbergasted.

Of course we cope, we cope with labour and we cope with shitty aftercare and nasty attitudes and a completely new and overwhelming environment (what I mean is screaming babies, bright lights, multiple loud converation's, sounds of some women making noises like they are having contractions, ridiculously hot temperatures, sales women, hunger, thirst, pain). But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be easier and more bearable with someone there if we feel we need it, and that support is available to us. I think you will find that however adamant you are about not having birth partners around for the duration of a woman's stay, there will be other women who are equally adamant that removing this would be cruel. So surely rather than some of us just having to suck it up then a practical solution could be found?

@Strikhedonia and rightly so.
It's an absolute disgrace.

@CherriesInTheSnow you are not reading what I'm writing.

I'm not saying ban them I'm saying moderate it. Hour upon hour of the ward being full of them is ridiculous. A PN ward is in a hospital it's not your home.

I also repeat that IF care was as it should be most women would be just fine without partners constantly in and out.

But I don't agree with you Gin that is your opinion and this is mine.

My partner was not just there for ptactical support. Or even just for emotional support. He was there because we created a child together and this was his baby too. My opinion on this will never change, and I will never personally feel that a stranger will make me feel as comfortable as having my partner there. I have been slated for this attitude before (by expat I think funnily enough) but I honestly don't care. We are both equally entitled to our preferences and yours do not trump mine, nor do mine yours. That's why there needs to be a different solution than banning partners, which doesn't completely ostracise women who want them there by making them feel like some kind of failure for wanting the father of their child to be able to be with their newborn baby as well.

Bed space in hospital is very expensive.
We should have a travel lodge type if place in the grounds. All family rooms with ensuite. A shop and cafe. Office and treatment rooms for community midwives on site.
Anyone without drip or catheter could go straight there.
Post natal ward should be for women who need nursing care. And the ward should be staffed by nurses and midwives.
No open visiting on the hospital ward.

I did read what you said and I still don't agree, because as I tried to say before with the night time ban, there isn't a practical solution that will work for all women. How do you decide hours since women give birth at all hours of the day, and how do you police it if you don't use a rigid time period?

I agree with endoftheline , it seems to work for othe countries and would work for everyone.

To be honest, a large part of what needs to change about birth is within this article.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/07/i-cant-forget-the-horror-of-my-sons-birth-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-childbirth?CMP=fb_gu

@endofthelinefinally just a few observation

-there would be enormous financial and facilities implications for this? The NHS is not exactly being given more money is it? Furthermore wherever possible land is being sold off at a rate of knots not acquired. Sites are crammed to bursting with buildings and car parks so where would they go?

• do other countries that have the system you've described have a universal health and social care model which is exactly the same as the NHS. Well, none will, not exactly the same.
• essentially you're talking about shifting primary care based services into an acute setting which is what the last fifteen years or so have been trying to shift away from.

-several acute trusts have / had patient hotels. The hospital I had my first two children and in November the third one stopped making the service available to maternity patients.

If a woman only needs the kind of postnatal care you've described then the current model is she receives it at home and in the community from midwives post discharge.

I don't think the waters of this campaign need muddying with that aspect of postnatal care, to me, the point of partners and guest visitors being a thorn in many women's sides, is that they are by and large only staying in the wards for this long because there aren't enough staff to do things. If this is tackled then visiting hours for partners should - in my view - be drastically curtailed and the postnatal environment be far more geared to recover and peace than people getting to hold their / a baby.

@CherriesInTheSnow my second child was born just before midnight. My DH was allowed to see we were safely on PN ward at midnight and sent packing.

My experience on that ward was dreadful. Of course I would have liked him there, but there were three other women in that room. One of them it turns out was a victim of dv, and the other two were in serious pain from sections. How was it fair on them to have a strange bloke bumbling around invading their space at 3am?

Yes. Ideally getting home asap would be great. But some sort of halfway house would be a good idea I think.
Back in the 70s we had a convalescent ward a mile or so up the road from the hospital specifically for gynae patients. It freed up acute beds but allowed women a few days of peace and basic care before going home. I thought then that it was a brilliant idea.

That's why there needs to be a different solution than banning partners

No partners overnight in shared bays.

Partners only allowed where there are private rooms available.

Private rooms to be allocated based on need (except of course in hospitals where all rooms are private rooms).

That way there are options for everybody.

Regardless of a child having two parents, the child and it's mother are the patients. The father is not. It is a hospital and patients must be given priority in terms of accommodation.

@CherriesInTheSnow (excellent username, by the way - a most excellent shade of lippie) - I have moved areas, so the change of hospital isn't through choice as such. Apologies that I can't be more helpful.

If there are funds and space for every post-natal woman to have a private room then that's a great solution.

But that wouldn't be feasible in most hospitals, so shared wards absolutely should operate on the same basis as every other - nobody expected to share a ward overnight with members of the opposite sex.

There are two groups of women - one who don't want to sleep with strange men near them, and one who want their partners there - and there is no compromise on a shared ward. It's also NOT the case, as people have said over the last few pages, that their wants are equal. The default position in hospitals is that partners do not stay overnight, for excellent reasons that are fully understood everywhere else in the NHS, and it shouldn't be the default position in post-natal wards.

In the wider population, outside of MN, I don't know how popular overnight partners would be but I suspect people wanting them would be in the minority and the majority of women wouldn't want partners there overnight.

A very large hospital in my area was going to trial overnight partners, post natal there is a mix of shared bays and private rooms. The idea was abandoned before the trial even began due to the sheer volume of complaints received about the idea.

Bearfrills From what I've seen in discussions/polls outside of MN, many women want their own partners there but very few want other people's. So overall they oppose overnight partners.

It's a matter of perspective though isn't it. I would have thought, from my own experience, given that I genuinely hardly heard a peep out of the partners but heard a great deal of noise from women themselves and other visitors, that most women want their partners there and don't begrudge others having that too, as long as they are quiet and respectful. I was much more off put but women loudly on the phone and arguments (?!!) between women and staff - mainly about feeding when I was in.

I'm just hoping really that I don't have to stay in so I can have my partner with me for my stay. I honestly didn't imagine it being any other way. I respect that others have a different opinion but do think a solution should and could be found that suits both parties. It's hard for me to hear so many be so begrudging of partners and it's probably hard for others to hear me be so adamant that they should be allowed 24/7. I don't know what the solution is. But it does put me on edge to think people would fight for a blanket limit rather than a middle ground regardless of the consequences it might have for some. But oh well!

@DeliciouslyHella thank you, yes I love the lipstick! that's fine, I am going to have a long talk with my midwife anyway, I'm sure she'll know the answer

I don't think people are being begrudging of other people's partners per se, @CherriesInTheSnow - they just don't want to have to put up with things like the lack of privacy when they are feeling very vulnerable, the noise, especially at night, having to try to sleep with several strange men in the same room as you, the extra heat and overcrowding, etc, etc.

You clearly had a good experience of being on a ward with other people's partners - but from accounts on here and elsewhere on MN, it is clear that many other women have encountered noisy, inconsiderate and unpleasant partners, and have therefore had a very different, much worse experience than you did.