To be deflated by the total indifference to harm being normalised on maternity wards

[RedToothBrush]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgvl8l5q0xo

This is MN.

And there seems to be a total indifference and acceptance to maternity care being completely substandard in this country?

Why aren't we completely enraged by this on MN?

Why have we become so passive and why have we rolled over with a seeming attitude that we should almost just deal with it and its not worth complaining anymore?

65% of maternity services in england were judged to be failing. 65%

Why are we not putting pressure for this to be a much higher priority.

The cost to the public sector from compensation related to maternity services is astronomical. It makes up 60% of all negligence claims. This is billions of pounds just on compensation.

This doesn't include the billions spend on care as a result of those harms to women and children.

This is something like £8.2 billion in the year 2021/22. ONE YEAR.

We keep talking about cuts and budget blackholes, but this makes no sense. A lack of investiment in adequate services is costing us billions per year. Savings that COULD be made with better care.

Why isn't this a priority, and why isn't there more women on MN standing up and saying this absoleutely isn't ok? There's plenty of threads about immigration or wars or private schools etc all the time. But maternity services? Tumbleweed.

MNHQ has run a campaign on post-natal care in the past and the situation seems to be getting worse not better. Its dreadful.

So yeah.

Here's a thread to shout about how bad it is. Cos I'm really pissed off. No one seems to be listening.

It’s shit. I remember the mumsnet campaign. I’m not sure anything has improved. All bar one midwife I’ve met treat me worse than an animal in the hospital - horrible attitudes, no pain relief, filthy toilets covered in blood and no toilet roll, the noise and the heat is unbearable, the tv coming on over your face at 6am, the food if you can get any is awful. It’s torture. But you didn’t actually die and your baby didn’t die so you have to be grateful.

They did, but maternity services were poor before 2010 as well.

I'd also like to bookmark this thread to link to on all the silly "why were you so selfish to only have one child" threads.

Err, so we didn't die the second time round and potentially leave two children without a mother.

Or be horribly injured and need surgery.

Or just have an awful experience.

I think the british public are basically taught from an early age to be grateful to the NHS. I had mine abroad, there are no midwives, you have to actually hire one privately if you want one. I had nurses and an obstetrician. I actually think the whole “get back to natural births” has gone shit for women. It’s fine if you want to but the standard should be epidural offered, obstetrician present. My obstetrician worked in the NHS for a stint, she said that midwives regularly called her too late for her to mount effective interventions.

I did get harassed by a breastfeeding person who my Dh eventually chucked out because I was getting quite distressed.

It’s bad and I don’t know what the answer is but I work in a unit that was recently rated “good” and can honestly say the midwives here are the most caring, dedicated bunch of ladies I have ever met.
There are a lot of patients who choose to have their babies here despite it being further away from the nearest hospital.

The midwives are so passionate and committed to their job.

It is possible for hospitals to provide a good service with the right management and team. I have also worked at units that simply are not, and never will be, fit for purpose. The best team in the world would not make it decent. Sometimes it’s just the fact that the building is crumbling and there aren’t enough rooms/beds/chairs to accommodate everyone even if lots of wonderful staff were magically recruited.

My ex is an obstetrician and he used to say the same, that he was called in too late

I can still hear the nursing staff shout 'you're pregnant not ill' with glee to recovering mothers who could barely walk trying to get some water or change bloodstained sheets. I will never ever forget, forgive or have another child because of my experiences (much more to it than what I've described). You can say it's money all you want but it's culture.

I've just given birth and it was quite frankly shocking. Without my partner being as incredible as he is I'd have been absolutely screwed. My epidural failed. I'd told them multiple times I thought it had, was having pain at the site and was able to get up and down off the bed and pee independently. They realised when the surgeon was prepping to cut me.

There was a point that DP and I were both asking for a midwife to help while I'm literally pushing and it was just me and him.

Zero pain relief after an epi and instrumental birth. Kept being promised something or another then after repeatedly chasing it up being told I couldn't have it after all.

My DP was constantly having to advocate and protect me and fill in the gaps of their lack of care. There are some lovely midwives but the service is just not at the level it should be.

@VesperLind could you please private message me your friend’s work contact details. I need a lawyer for this exact reason. Both myself and my daughter were failed and have both been left with life changing disabilities and multiple painful surgeries.

It is truly very sad, and most women have a terrible story to tell.

Fortunately for me, my 'terrible' story was just that I was left completely unattended and the midwife only wrote down that she delivered the baby because she happened to walk in after DH demanded that she come in because I knew I was delivering and she didn't believe me, and just managed to get her gloves on in time to literally catch baby.

She was useless. I was the only woman in the midwifery unit and I was still on my own for the entire birthing process. She checked me when I first arrived and then left me. No painkillers, even when I asked her Student, no using the pool/water, no TENS machine, no birthing ball/stool even though they should all have been available, nothing. DH was told I wouldn't be progressing that fast and basically implied that I was putting it on when I said how much pain I was in. I wasn't even screaming and shouting, I didn't actually make any noise, but I was in agony and desperate for pain relief.

But anyway. It's not that bad in comparison to the true horror stories. But it's sad that we all have a story.

@Flibflobflibflob

Ah yes, one of the midwives who I saw during my very long first labour kept saying telling me to hurry up and progress or "we'll have to get the doctor in and you don't want that".

Actually I did want that, I wanted it very much and it would have cut my ordeal down considerably.

And I don't think I could turn my back to back baby just by wanting it badly enough - she was big and she was jammed in there and they made me wait a dangerously long time to even attempt to get her out by intervention.

Having had four births in NHS Scotland, I can honestly say reading this thread is absolutely heartbreaking to read. Like I have read something from s parallel universe. My experiences were mainly positive and couldn't fault the staff. Even when my youngest was born very prematurely, we were still very well cared for.

Birth trauma resolution is part of my practice. I've seen women who had a perfect physics birth with terrible PTSD because of the way they were ignored, spoken to, dismissed. Medically bad experiences don't necessarily bring trauma. Being invalidated as human when you are powerless will.

This is what happened to me. Medically it was fine but throughout I was either ignored or dismissed or at some points lied to. I was left entirely alone for long stretches (I had gone into labour when at hospital with my very ill son) and noone came when I pressed the buzzer, I was in an entirely empty day ward (at night) and just left alone with the labour progressing rapidly. Noone acknowledged my distress about my son who was still in hospital. I can't even talk about my first midwife, who sneered and laughed at me among other things. My second midwife was obsessed with finding her lost cardigan.

The only nice and positive bit of the experience was when they thought I would need interventions and wheeled me into the theatre and the obstetrician and anaesthetist were absolutely warm and lovely and chatted to me and reassured me.

10 years on and I haven't really recovered, and for many years I had awful PTSD.

It’s been like this for years. My first experience of birth was so awful 28 years ago at St Mary’s Paddington that I went for a different hospital and elective caesarean for the second.

Basically I was induced, was left in agony labouring away in front of interested visitors on a pre natal ward. My husband was prevented from seeing me and when he did arrive, ran to get a doctor with a midwife trying to stop him. I was 7cm dilated and the midwife claimed I was not in labour. I then was taken to a Labour ward and 12 hours later gave birth in the operating theatre. I was lucky my DC did not die. My DC was absolutely traumatised. We both were. The post birth experience was even worse.

My health visitor encouraged me to complain but I was gaslighted throughout the whole process. My GP just said I was lucky not to have a bad wound.

Woman’s health is not taken seriously. I had a major autoimmune illness in my 20s. Because I was undiagnosed I was accused of making it up despite being in hospital with a temp of 43 degrees.

My DD2 has various gynaecological problems which are being trivialised. My DD1 had a scary heart episode and was told she was having a panic attack. She is a vet and knows what symptoms are FFS.

The only way to get better treatment is to pay privately.

I don’t think we should have a system like the US but surely some sort of health insurance like they have in Western Europe will be better than this shit.

I kind of resent the implication that I should be more enraged about failing maternity services than failure in any other area of healthcare. It is not automatically more important just because we are women. People are affected by all sorts of issues within the NHS that are equally as important, if not more so.

The biggest thing when it comes to maternity is that these failings can easily be demonstrated to be costing the NHS more, and that investment would have a financial benefit.

This is very easy to demonstrate compared to other departments.

It has also been demonstrated that women's healthcare is far worse than men's in many areas. This is naturally the more significant area because prevention is undesirable as a society.

This isn't remotely about women being more important somehow.

It's about structural failure, discrimination and incompetence in terms of management. And this being incredibly easy to show up in maternity services.

It's not more important because we're women.

It's more important because we are all born.

The errors in my care were identical to errors made for both my mum and my MIL. Both could have ended in disaster, both involved women being totally ignored by arrogant and mean maternity services. My mum was also pushed hard to abort me because they said I was already dead, and she was adamant that I wasn't.

That was 35 years ago.

If we don't keep complaining, there will be another 35 years of people being born who start their lives being put in medical danger.

The trouble is that anytime someone suggests serious reform of the NHS, the usual bunch of suspects (looking at you Guardian) start yelling about the NHS being "privatised" or "sold off" and so the Govt (of whatever party) backs off - moral courage not being a quality in most UK politicians.

There's also an argument that the women going into give birth are young and fit, and shouldn't be coming out of hospital with injuries they didn't have when they went in.

Exactly. It makes no sense to cause women such harm (physically/mentally) that they cost the NHS a fortune in treating the after effects.

Ha! It doesn't treat the after effects. Over the course of many years nagging and waiting, you might get somewhere but I bet most give up

I complained to PALS after both of my births, and had a lengthy conversation with a senior midwife both times. Three years apart in the same hospital and a lot of the same issues were there.

There has been more coverage of it recently though - the Times I think first calculated that the NHS spends more on medical negligence cases connected to birth than it does on maternity care and covered that at length. There was the Parliamentary report on birth trauma led by Theo Clarke (whose speech on her personal experience I really recommend reading/watching - at one point she's really struggling to hold it together and Andrea Leadsom intervenes to give her time to collect herself enough to carry on).

But like you I am so frustrated: how many of these reports will it take for the system to change?

I think there’s also an expectation that women should just get on with it, and birth injuries should just be accepted.

If men were left incontinent and injured after a normal life event, there might be a different take on such things.

Human birth is particularly difficult because of how large babies heads are, compared to every other species. And they are getting bigger. I don't like this belief that it's normal and so natural and so should be risk free. It's really not like that. Noone is using forceps or episiotomies for fun. It's cos your baby is unfortunately stuck, and you'll both die without intervention.