Two thirds of maternity units in England 'not safe enough'

[ArthurbellaScott]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67238868

This is horrifying.

Content warning in the article link, baby death

'BBC analysis of Care Quality Commission (CQC) records showed it deemed two-thirds (67%) of them not to be safe enough, up from 55% last autumn.
The "deterioration" follows efforts to improve NHS maternity care, and is blamed partly on a midwife shortage.
The government said maternity care was of the "utmost importance".
The Department for Heath and Social Care (DHSC) said £165m a year was being invested in boosting the maternity workforce, but said "we know there is more to do".
The BBC's analysis also revealed the proportion of maternity units with the poorest safety ranking of "inadequate" - meaning that there is a high risk of avoidable harm to mother or baby - has more than doubled from 7% to 15% since September 2022.'

Had anyone written a book about this? Or can you point me to the best bits of investigative journalism about it? I feel compelled to learn more.

I’m a student midwife at the moment and yup, this doesn’t surprise me.

Our trust is rated as ‘needs improvement’ on things like lack of equipment and staffing. All management issues that really affect the care we can give. It’s very difficult to monitor your baby if it takes me 20 minutes to find a sonicaid!

The way student midwives are treated in some trusts is shocking too. If three student midwives are being supervised by one midwife, there are very few learning opportunities available, (not my trust but the one a friend is training at) and you end up with student midwives just scraping through their clinical assessments….not ideal for the women they will be caring for!

Jesus. I also had an extremely unsympathetic male midwife who spoke to my husband throughout rather than to me and invited my husband to inspect my stitches when I was healing. Thank god he wasn’t there for the actual birth.

James Titcombe wrote a very good book called Joshua's Story about the death of his baby son Joshua and how that led him to campaign for an inquiry into maternity care at Furness General Hospital where his son died. The 2015 report from that inquiry, known as the Morecambe Bay report, or the Kirkup Report, is worth reading - as are the more recent reports into Shrewsbury and Telford and East Kent.

The Independent, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times have all done some good investigative journalism into failings of NHS maternity care.

Shaun Lintern has been unrelenting in his concern for patient safety and coverage of the various maternity scandals.

Shaun Lintern is health editor of The Sunday Times. An investigative health journalist for more than a decade, he has helped expose some of the worst scandals in NHS history, including the Shropshire and Telford maternity disaster and poor care at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust and subsequent public inquiry. He was health correspondent for The Independent during the Coronavirus pandemic and previously bureau chief for the Health Service Journal.

https://tcij.org/person/shaun-lintern/

Analgesia isn't without other consequences during birth. Depending on what's used and when, it can impede or interfere with labour, and sometimes lead to a 'cascade of interventions'.

Oh, sorry, that was a response to a post that must have been on the previous page.