Father steps in after call to midwife fails to deliver

A FATHER was required to deliver his own baby after a maternity ward temporarily closed due to midwife shortages.

New parents Polly and Matt planned to have their baby at home, but Peterborough City Hospital could not find a midwife to attend to them.

In a 999 call, Polly can be heard asking for help as she panics that she will have to give birth alone. “We need somebody here. They’re not coming. Nobody’s coming,” she says.

She told BBC Look East: “We got the call saying, ‘Right – no help is coming to you. You’ll either have to find your way into hospital or go it alone and call paramedics.’”

The maternity ward at Peterborough City Hospital was closed 12 times between July and September, often for days at a time. Expectant mothers have been turned away on numerous occasions.

A whistleblower from the department said: “You should have three midwives on duty day and night but more often than not it’s two at best and regularly only one.”

When asked if she’d recommend the hospital to expectant mothers, she responded: “I’d be really nervous for them to go there, simply because I couldn’t guarantee they’d get the right kind of support because there’s not enough staff there to support them.”

Chief Nurse at the North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust, Jo Bennis, admitted that safety may have been compromised at times but assured patients that staff levels are monitored.

She added: “To put the context to it, there aren’t just midwives in a team, there’s maternity support workers, there’s healthcare assistants, and we have put nurses into roles that midwives don’t necessarily have to do, to enable our qualified midwives to do their very specialised care delivery.”

The situation is similar nationwide – a midwife at the Rosy Maternity Unit in Cambridge told the BBC that newly qualified midwives are facing difficult cases without proper management.

She said: “The newly qualified midwives are being thrown in at the deep end .”

The Royal College of Midwives has estimated that more than 3,500 midwives are urgently needed due to masses of newly qualified staff leaving after just a year in the profession.