Our NHS maternity wards need more than pre-emptive apologies
God help any pregnant woman who’s been watching This Is Going to Hurt, the BBC drama series based on the bestselling book by Adam Kay. Before he turned comedian, Kay, played here by Ben Whishaw, worked as an acting registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology (or “brats and t---s”, as it is unaffectionately known). Do not be deceived by the madcap sitcom air. This is the brutal story of a health service that barely functions, where new mums-to-be, on the most important day of their lives, are treated like slabs of meat or unfortunately spouting orifices.
Whishaw may mug winningly at the camera for laughs, but one tragic wrong call, made when Kay had done two shifts on the labour ward back to back, with only three hours’ sleep, results in a perilously premature baby. The only surprise is there aren’t more catastrophes.
I confidently predict that no one will be laughing when the latest instalment of Fiona Ockenden’s report on the Shrewsbury and Telford Trust is published this month.
Shockingly inadequate maternity care at that NHS trust led to the largest maternity scandal in NHS history, involving 1,862 families. The scandal was finally exposed by bereaved parents, including the remarkable Rhiannon Davies and Richard Stanton, whose first baby, Kate, died in 2009 as a result of avoidable mistakes by midwives and doctors.
In what feels like a pre-emptive strike, Gill Walton, the head of the Royal College of Midwives, has just apologised for the RCM’S part in promoting “normal” births that contributed to the deaths of mothers and babies. Walton admitted some midwives had turned legitimate efforts to improve care into “a dangerous ideology that had gone too far”.
What happened is certain midwives took it into their heads that a “normal”, or vaginal, birth was always best, and sod the poor woman still struggling after 24 hours of trying to push out a stuck baby (women exactly like I was in 1996). “It’s called labour for a reason,” one midwife chided a distraught woman.
It suited trusts to drive down the rate of caesarean sections because it saved them money. A guide produced by the RCM in 2008 said: “Intervention and caesarean shouldn’t be the first choice – they should be the last.” How many died or were damaged due to that pious nonsense?
Last month, NHS England abandoned the use of disgraceful C-section targets as a performance measure due to “concerns over safety”. Concerns which had been flagged up for many years by mothers who were either lucky to survive their child’s birth or whose infant was dead on arrival. No one listened to them. How many dentists would still be in practice if they consistently told clients that having root canal work without anaesthetic was better for them?
Although the UK supposedly remains one of the safest countries for women to give birth, the rate of infant mortality remains significantly higher than most European countries. I would go further and say that the maternity unit at Shrewsbury and Telford was a deathtrap. I hope Ockenden throws the book at them.
As Queen Victoria, a fan of chloroform, wrote in her diary: “We are having the baby, therefore we will have the anaesthetic.” Quite so, Ma’am.