Midwife prediction 20 weeks off

[Robinbuildsbears]

This hasn't happened to me, but to my SIL instead.

SIL has been feeling like she might be pregnant for a little while, but didn't stop getting her periods and has been on the pill so didn't take a pregnancy test until she started to get bigger in the belly.

She got her initial midwife appointment 2 weeks after calling with a positive test, where the midwife felt her belly and decided that she couldn't feel her uterus, so wrote down an estimate of 7 weeks. SIL insisted on getting a scan earlier than 5 weeks away, so the midwife reluctantly agreed to give her an appointment a few days later (today).

The scan confirmed that she is approximately 27 weeks along, literally 20 weeks further than the first midwife had said. Obviously a big shock for everyone in the family, and also for the staff at the hospital, if the first midwife hadn't written down in her notes 7 weeks they wouldn't have believed it.

How does a trained professional midwife manage to get it so wrong? Is it really that difficult to tell, does this sort of thing happen often? Or was this midwife just completely incompetent? My feeling is that SIL should put in a complaint about her and that she clearly needs retraining or something, or am I being too harsh?

It's not impossible its just rare

Exactly this, it’s probably a skill a midwife working in a country with no pregnancy tests or scans becomes quite proficient at and be potentially consequential but not something (like identifying a breech baby through feeling tummy alone) you can ever expect anyone to get right 100% of the time. The focus of the midwife at that first appointment in the UK is primarily looking at any risk factors e.g previous caesarean section, smoking, diabetes etc and doing the necessary referrals and plus arranging for the bloods tests to identify blood group, antibodies etc. Plus giving the basic health information etc.
They go by the period dates, it’s very unusual for someone to continue to have periods through their pregnancy so most of the time that is going to be fairly accurate and the midwife wouldn’t even feel the tummy on the first appointment unless the woman has reason to believe her period dates don’t correlate. Your SIL was around 7 weeks based on that I assume, the system doesn’t really allow any other date to be put in until confirmed by scan btw. Your sister in law indicated she thought she was further along than her period dates suggested so the midwife felt her tummy and supposedly didn’t think she was further along but still listened to what your sister was saying and booked her an earlier scan. (She can’t just book everyone an early scan unless convinced strong likelihood periods dates correlate otherwise she would be taking up slots needed for babies they have a genuine concern over but she obviously took what your SIL was saying seriously)
That’s a perfectly safe midwife in my opinion ( as a healthcare professional) and would be a quite happy for my daughter to be cared for by such a midwife

Whether or not the midwife "should" have been able to gauge gestation by palpation - you still only have grounds for complaint if there was a negative outcome or even a near miss of a negative outcome.

In this case there was no negative outcome, there was never even a near-miss risk of a negative outcome, because your SIL would have been scanned in 4w anyway even if she hadn't asked for an earlier one.

Those few weeks would have made no difference really to the safety/health of the baby or the mum.

@Robinbuildsbears to be honest you come across awfully in this thread, so many little snarky nasty unecessary remarks.