For those who are intested, there was a meeting yesterday with the head of midwifery about the maternity situation. I've just done a not-so-brief sumamry for the FB group but I shall post it here too.
Just though I'd do a bit of a summary of yesterday. I think the meeting was very positive, since I missed the MSLC I don't know how much detail they went into there but they gave a lot of detail as to how they had got into the situation (basically a whole load of complications with people on long term sick ending up being off longer, people of short term sick ending up long term and so on) and how the decision was made to close MLU.
The MWs went to the board and said there were problems, the board were happy to pay overtime to keep things going but there comes a point when you jsut can't do that any longer for legal reasons to do with working hours and also safety as tired MWs are of course not a good thing. They went to recruitment twice but didn't fill all the posts until recently. The decision making was done on a week by week basis until finally they had to close.
They confirmed that the HB cancellation was preventative. The board felt that they needed equality. They could not have large numbers of women who had been due to give birth at teh MLU switch to HB as they did not have the staff and the board felt it would be unfair to refuse new HBs while attending others. The MWs went away and thought about it and decided they wanted to honour those booked in for HB from the start of their pregnancy and they went backto the board with that.
They took on board that communication of this back to the women concerned had been poor and they said they had learned a few lessons there. They will be making better use (hopefully!) of the trust website so that accurate information and updates can be posted there rather than having lots of hearsay floating around. They also mentioned a problem with the way they file things with regards to who is giving birth where that did not give them accurate figures. Apparently they used to have files right fro the start of pregnancy but a while ago it was streamlined to only have the 34 week confirmation. They said they would have to look back at that and perhaps change it.
They talked al ittle about how they are going to change staffing for the future to guard against haivng problems like this again. This will take time as it will have to go through lots of levels as it will mean a fairly major restructure. Not that I followed all of that but apparently it will help!
They stressed that every year they fight to point out how well the MLU is used compared to other stand alone units and to keep it going. They would love more people to use it although of course geographically it just isn't possible for a lot of people but even withing Bishop itself people don't use it much. Ditto HB, they are very pro and are interested to see what wil happen after all the recent talk that more women shouyld have babies in MLUS or at home. They said part of our problem really is the low rate so ratehr than meaning that it should be easy to cover them it means that we don't have a dedicated HB team. If we had a higher rate then there would be the possibility of funding for a dedicated team. We can only dream!
The message yeaterday was that all the available jobs have been filled and several long term sick are making moves to come back. The MLU and HB will be back to normal in September.