Women's care

[PlanetTeaTime]

Since having my daughter I've become even more passionate about women's rights, I think a lot of the systems and procedures in the NHS work against women. In childbirth they seem to be more liability adverse than woman and baby centred. With breastfeeding there doesn't seem to be a great deal of support. Although i appreciate this care can vary in the different trusts.

Feel very strongly that it is an enormous responsibility to bring a child in to the world yet women are being treated very poorly, for example why do we not have individual midwifery care?

I would really like to do something to make a difference, but I wouldn't know where to start. Just wondered if there was anyone else on here working or perhaps volunteering to try to make change? Can you suggest anything I could do or work towards doing?

Thank you

Individual midwifery care? So if you are in labour for three days and nights with a slow induction, you want your “individual midwife” to work a 72 hour continuous shift? Or have I misunderstood? And what if she is away on holiday when you go into labour a week early? How could it possibly work?
The best you could reasonably get is to try and see the same midwife for each antenatal appointment, but even that can’t be guaranteed with staff shortages and cross cover.
Obstetricians are “liability averse” because they don’t want dead mothers and brain damaged babies. Rather more important than providing hippy woo “mother centred birth experiences”, no?
Sorry if I sound harsh, OP. I’m a retired anaesthetist, who has seen a fair share of emergency obstetrics over my 36 years in the NHS. My hospital didn’t have a single maternal death caused by intervention in that time - but they did lose mothers to pre eclampsia related brain haemorrhage, when those mothers had defaulted antenatal care.

Back in the 80s we had "know your midwife" teams. Professor Caroline Flint did a lot of work on this and wrote an excellent book called Sensitive Midwifery.
However, that level of service requires money. There just isnt that level of funding now.