It’s a disgrace that we can’t guarantee a baby’s safe passage
Is it possible to have a discussion about a
70 per cent increase in pregnant women being turned away from overrun maternity units without mentioning immigration? Incredibly, it seems that it is. New data obtained by the Labour Party says 382 maternity units had to close their doors in 2016 due to lack of beds or staff; 10 units closed 10 times or more. To adapt a well-known slogan: labour isn’t working.
Why ever not? To the shocking shortage of midwives – an issue on which I have campaigned for years – add a huge increase in the number of babies. So, where did they come from, do you suppose; storks leaving them under gooseberry bushes?
Yesterday morning, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mishal Husain interviewed Cathy Warwick of the Royal College of Midwives. I waited patiently for either woman to mention the “demographic bump” that may have caused this dangerous log-jam.
In certain maternity units “10 to 15 women in a 24-hour period are not admitted to the place where they thought they might give birth” Warwick said. “It could be too many women are turning up to give birth at the same time,” prompted Husain. As if birth can be managed like restaurant tables. “Sorry madam, if you could please sit at the bar until you’re nine centimetres dilated.”
Why are there suddenly so many pregnant women? Husain didn’t ask and Warwick didn’t say. This is purely a staffing and resources issue, you understand. And yet, I bet I could pick out 10 high-migrant areas on a map and find maternity units in crisis.
During the EU referendum, I gave a speech on the stress immigration puts on maternity care. I was incensed at how a friend’s daughter had turned up at a hospital in East Anglia, along with her partner, expecting their first child to enter the world in the reassuring presence of familiar midwives.
The unit entrance was locked. They pounded on the door until a harassed nurse appeared to deliver the old Bethlehem innkeeper line, “Sorry, we’re full.” Now in considerable discomfort, this expectant mother was told to go to a maternity unit some 45 minutes’ drive away.
Appalled to think this was happening in our advanced nation, I started to do some research and found that some maternity units were forced to close to new births for two days. Leeds NHS Trust turned away women in labour 220 times in a single year. Mums-to-be attending Peterborough City Hospital were told to make their way to Kettering in Northamptonshire or Boston in Lincolnshire.
Every time Remain campaigners mention the economic benefits of EU migrant workers, I think of another kind of labour. Of frightened women left on their own because there are not enough midwives to support them. Of birth plans torn up and women sent into the night with only a satnav to guide them. However, this is not just about inconvenience and fear. Each year, between 500 and 800 British babies die or are left with severe brain injury because of sub-standard care at birth. Blunders on maternity wards cost the NHS £1.2 billion a year.
A lack of “continuity of care” is part of the problem. You’re not going to get much continuity if the midwives you’ve been seeing throughout your pregnancy are in one town and the birth is in another, are you?
In this paper yesterday, Ruth Davidson called on the Tories to lead a “rational discussion” about the pros and cons of immigration. That would be nice. So, let’s start by addressing this fact: according to the UK Statistics Authority, one in three children born in the UK last year had at least one parent from overseas. In 2000, that figure stood at just 21 per cent.
Babies are the sweetness in life and it’s precisely because they are so precious that it’s a disgrace that we can’t guarantee them safe passage into this world. And it’s going to get worse.
The numbers are stark. The Office for National Statistics predicts that the UK’S population could rise to
73 million by 2035. But successive governments must have put some of the economic benefit accrued from immigration into public services? Have they hell. Until the Brexit vote, the impact on the general populace was barely considered.
When David Cameron entered Downing Street in 2010 he pledged to train 5,000 new midwives to cope with the baby boom created when New Labour opened our borders prematurely to millions of eastern Europeans. Three years later, I appeared with him ITV’S The Agenda with Tom Bradby and asked: “Where are those 5,000 midwives you promised, Prime Minister?”
My, how he blushed.
I voted Leave not because I am against immigration but because our public services were quite clearly at breaking point. A midwife friend told me about the diabolical conditions she and her colleagues face daily in struggling to provide a safe standard of care, while women in labour are on trolleys in a corridor. Now, at long last, 6,000 midwives are being trained and they will soon be needed to replace the shattered, disillusioned staff who are leaving the NHS in droves.
Ms Davidson says that a mature debate on immigration should not pander to the “Britain’s full up” brigade. Well, lassy, Scotland hasn’t experienced the pressures of immigration England faces. And before you speak so contemptuously, can I suggest you ask a midwife desperately trying to do their job in Newham or Peterborough if they thinks the country can take much more?
Politicians may still try to bury their heads in the sand and renege on Brexit, but it isn’t maternity units that should be saying they’re closed. It’s the country.