the petition going round about dads in hospitals

[strawberryswizzler]

just me who is absolutely against this idea? i’ve had 2 c-sections. one emergency, one elective. could barely sit myself up to feed my baby nevermind walk properly etc, i felt so vulnerable. the thought of being in a 4 bed bay separated only by curtains with random men who could be anyone makes me feel ill. anyone else??

Exactly! 99% of Midwives nowadays are so stretched that they have lost sight of why they started the job and don't give a shit. If you have a birth partner to help then they should be allowed to stay and help you because those buggers won't!

Same.my husband was fing useless. Even with second elective c section. 🤦‍♀️

my younger relative has just had a baby, long slow labour . Her dh rang her mum 12 hours in asking for her to come along cos he and his labouring wife couldn’t cope . her mum is a paeds nurse and off course went along. Why didn’t daughter and mum just do birth without dad from get go? Mum way better qualified and experienced and dare I say, empathetic, compared with the husband. Because we have this relatively new trend that dads should be there and are expected to be best support. I expect in a small majority of cases they aren’t a support at all. They are woefully ill equipped to support. End up upsetting, irritating or stressing mum . Yep, a few are probably very good, especially in second births. But I suspect if mums are honest, they’d have been better off with an experienced woman who could directly relate to them . However, understand not everyone is in place to have another woman to support her - I didn’t

If I had a partner and was of the opinion that men should have overnight access then yes because it would be a personal choice and I would not want another woman to be uncomfortable with that choice.

The state of maternity care in the UK is scandalous. As a service provided exclusively to women this does raise questions as to the reason. I suspect there would be an outcry if similar standards applied to an exclusively male service.

It isn't good enough and has never been good enough. Even in the interwar years the UK had a disgracefully high maternal mortality rate. You can't unpick a mess like that overnight, or with one petition, but this needs to be given far more priority than it's received so far.

In the meantime, and in answer to the OP, men as birthing partners are absolutely fine in the delivery room and the very well monitored recovery room immediately afterwards. This encroaches on the needs and care of no other patients.

On post-natal wards, I am against and would sign a petition to that effect. I had an EMCS and a frightening labour owing to DS decelerating: it was a very scary time until he was safely with us. Born at 4pm, DH with us in recovery room then out for the night by 9pm. This was fine. We'd have willingly booked and paid for a private room but none were available at that time. There were also no private facilities for delivery within many miles of our location.

An aside, as to how female-only care is conducted, those data-mining companies should be nowhere near vulnerable patients who have just been through a major physical trauma. Do they still let these people in? I find it a travesty that this ever happened in the first place. They'd not allow ambulance-chasing personal injury firms into a major trauma ward where people are being stitched together following accidents: why, then, post-natal women? I think the answer is obvious.

I'd want rid of them first, followed swiftly by men taking up female patients' space, washing facilities, etc.

What other couples are doing during that vulnerable time is nothing to do with you, I seriously doubt they are looking at the other women.

You're the umpteenth person to drop into this thread to say that when when -

1. It's established through research that around 6500 sex attacks are known to have happened in hospital settings in the last 3 years.

1. a number of women on this very thread have recounted men on the ward being exhibiting voyeuristic and otherwise sexualised behaviours.

I have been on a mixed ward after appendix removal,didnt have a problem with this, ideally all womens would have been better but mentally its a different place after childbirth, then you feel more defnesive over a newborn and dont want any random jerk at arms legnth from your newborn when you sleep

I agree that postnatal care is generally worse nowadays that when i had my dc and when I worked as a midwife but and this won't be a popular opinion many women nowadays are very precious and expect far to much!! They actively don't want to help themselves and expect everything done for them! This was one of the reasons ( not the only reason) i left healthcare because i was starting to have a massive lack of compassion with entitled, precious patients! Men tend to be more of a PIA on a maternity ward than anything else and its very unfair on other women to have to tolerate unknown males there all night! However i do think consideration should be given to allowing female relatives/friends to stay overnight to help postnatal women, but i also think this would enable NHS bosses to get away with reducing actual qualified staff even more!

a number of women on this very thread have recounted men on the ward being exhibiting voyeuristic and otherwise sexualised behaviours.

I have only skimmed the thread and missed this detail, but it's so frighteningly common. My experience of this wasn't on a post-natal word - men were not allowed on ours overnight. This was in a major trauma ward following a fractured spine - so I was totally immobile for some of that time - back in summer 2022. Following surgery I was moved into a single-sex bay in the less higher-dependency unit (with solid partitions) within the larger wards.

The female bay was at the far right-hand end of this unit. There were lavatory facilities all the way along the adjoining corridor, including directly opposite the male bay to the left. I had the bed adjacent to the corridor.

A man took it into his head to walk all the way down to use the loos at the end, beyond the female bay. He was like Brackett the Butler, up and down all day long, pyjama flies pulled wide open so you could clearly see his todger wriggling about. Every single time.

The MO of men like this is plausible deniability. Why, then, use the facilities immediately adjacent to the female bay? Why not use the more convenient ones directly outside his own bay? Why walk up and down all day long with his tackle on show?

I don't buy that this was accidental for one tiny nanosecond. I had to keep the curtains permanently closed.

Many men seem to think it's their right to be there at the birth. I've read threads where the parents are not together and the father is still coercing the mother to let him watch. I agree that many women would be better off with other women, it's how women gave birth for centuries.

amazing how much those women are being ignored isn’t it. the “not my husband, he’s nice and wouldn’t hurt a fly” attitude is a joke

So, women who have a supportive partner who isn't a creep have to go through the biggest thing to ever happen to them alone? Seems fair...

it’s not the biggest thing to happen to them. the birth is the biggest thing, postnatal care is 99% sleeping baby and mum sitting in bed waiting for the next feed. yes, it is fair. what would be unfair is women who are trying to recover from birth having to do so surrounded by unknown visitors

As a mother having had 3 LSCS and a midwife, I don’t believe the majority of husbands are of any use at all.
I have witnessed men using patient bathrooms and leaving them in a really bad state, spitting in the ward sinks,
walking around in a state of undress and absolutely they do look around curtains at other women. In many cases they are asleep on the bed while their wife sits in the chair with the baby - looking at husband with dewy eyes so clearly not seeing any issues. We don’t all have the same standards and expectations.
Space is a big issue for most hospitals which is why there are still bays and few side rooms. These rooms are often not private but are used following babyloss, where women have special medical requirements, where mum and baby need extra care or babies are in the Neonatal unit. Round beds in bays, you need to be able to get in and potentially have an emergency team should anything happen so partitioning them off would not work.
Before the idea of rooming in, mums would be offered the chance to have their babies cared for in the nursery and brought back for feeding or bottle fed by staff. For many women this was a life saver and meant they felt better in the morning. Not all changes are positive.
There are comments about midwives not being trusted with mothers and babies which is really sad.
Men are not always trustworthy even if they are yours and as someone who has been sexually abused, there is no way I would be comfortable having strange men next to me at night.
It is not easy to ask someone to leave if they are inappropriate - we are encouraged not to do anything that can lead to complaints. There is no managerial support. Look at the number of comments where women have said that they encourage their men to kick off or not take no for an answer. That is what we have to deal with. Imagine if you are 18 and fresh out of school coming into this career and having to deal with aggressive men - they don’t stay long. No one wants to be a midwife any more. The salary isn’t enough to make dealing with rude husbands and unsupportive management a good job to have.
i loved the days when I could properly care for women and ask them incredibly personal questions without another man behind the curtain. It is dreadful. Our job now is loads of paperwork and having long conversations about why we can’t discharge someone in five minutes which takes us away from mums and babies - the changes are often negative and it is really sad for everyone.
sorry that ended up being very long!

It's established through research that around 6500 sex attacks are known to have happened in hospital settings in the last 3 years.
It is worth highlighting that 1 in 7 of these took place on wards. So approx 309 per year. Which is still 309 too many and utterly abhorrent but in the scheme of determining whether men on a postnatal ward past 9pm post a risk to the women there, it doesn’t really prove much. Many of these will be assaults on staff and in mental health wards or similar. Better statistics would be to compare assaults on postnatal wards that allow men vs ones that do not and see if there’s an identified increase there.

I do see stories of women who’ve had a horrible time with people’s partners on wards and that deserves attention, but so do the women who would have had a better time in a time they felt more vulnerable if their partner had been there.

It would make sense to make some of the wards mixed sex, so women who’d prefer their partner there are able to, and those who want female only wards have their own section. This way nurses can also hopefully give better care to women alone who need help having their baby passed to them or similar as they can be better based in the female only section.

We shouldn’t need our partners to give care, but we also shouldn’t need to wait 18 hours in A&E, or two years for an op, or 3 months for a GP appointment. Fat chance of any of that changing soon so until then, women should be allowed a choice at what is an incredibly vulnerable, and often traumatising, time of their life.

MissionImpossible3 well said!

Thanks. It's useful to hear from ward staff who have a longer overview of male behaviour on the wards.

I also think it's a shame that the use of nurseries for a few hours is frowned upon now. With my first I managed to get a few hours decent sleep the 2nd night when a lovely auxiliary nurse offered to watch her in the nursery for a few hours. It was only a short period but a little bit of deep sleep made all the difference the next day. It made no difference to bonding or feeding. If anything it helped because babies do pick up on maternal exhaustion and stress.

Of course this was over 30 years ago so the wards were mostly quiet at night bar the babies. No TVs, no mobile phones, no men.

To be fair, other comments about poor postnatal care and how that has mentally damaged some of them including PPD etc are being ignored by some too.

Both ''sides'' think their opinion is right due to personal experiences, as it is with most things.

the threat of a shared maternity ward would be enough to keep me child free. It doesn’t matter if there are men there or not. I really don’t get how the birth rate hasn’t gone to near zero.

But the presence of men 24/7 isn't the only (or imo even a) solution for poor postnatal care. The two "sides" are not equivalent.

This thread (on dads in wards) is a legit topic, but just wondering, are you the one that says men should pay for coffees on first dates because women risk being raped on the date? The typing style is the same

I can understand why it is proposed, because it can be seen as an immediate ''fix'''. Not to mention the baby care that is needed and people believing that the baby's father would be best to do that since it is their baby too.

Of course the best solution is going to be funding it properly but that just isn't going to happen any time soon.

exactly. it’s not a side to say my care was awful it left me with ppd therefore my random bloke should be allowed in to care for me. that’s just not the answer.

and also saying people are ignoring those saying they had ppd because of being in hospital - they’re not. as i’ve said already my own postnatal experience was absolutely disgraceful and i also had ppd and ppa (not sure if it was anything to do with my hospital experience but still) but i would’ve felt even worse about it if id been shuffling around with blood on my gown etc in full view of other men

as in me? i’ve never heard of that thread so no sorry

I don't think it can be called a "fix" if it only applies to some people. Access to basic medical care for brand new mums and babies shouldn't be dependant upon having a helpful, physically able partner, plentiful childcare for kids at home, paid paternity leave etc etc. It's not good enough at all. The NHS budget is ~£180bn, of which £3bn is spent on maternity care. There is no excuse for unsafe staffing levels. Any debate about men being around as moral support should be entirely secondary.

But it also works both ways. A woman who is used to having her supportive, loving husband/partner with her, can be made to feel uncomfortable and vulnerable having to survive those first few nights of motherhood. Especially when it is notoriously difficult to gain any assistance from a professional. Not their fault as such, but just horrendously understaffed