Postby Maternity crisis » Tue Jan 02, 2024 9:45 am
Sadly, there is a national shortage of midwives that makes maternity care very unsafe. If you google this, you will see the issue. A friend retrained to become a midwife recently and she has gone into work the day after wisdom teeth removal, when in pain and on a lot of Tramadol. When I asked what on earth she was doing, she said that her hospital were meant to have 12 midwives on duty but had only five. If she didn't go in, they would have four. Better she was there to do the baseline jobs to free up the well staff for the more complex roles. She has also commented that the pressures such desperate understaffing cause mean midwives burn out, and are leaving.
Despite all of this, trainee midwives were pressed into service in the pandemic in the exact same way trainee nurses were... but unlike trainee nurses, they were not paid for it. We treat midwives, nationally, very badly. It is not valued as much as nursing, yet midwives are simply nurses with further training.
It's not a St George's problem. It's a national shortage of midwives problem, and the only way to fix it would be a generous bursary through training, and then a golden hello for every midwife who completed training and worked in the NHS for at least 3 years post-qual. They have the same issue with social workers, incidentally. We have allowed the most core professions to quietly collapse, in intake terms. This has been predictable, and is now here.
If there is any way at all you can possibly afford it, I would look into private care, or having a doula (check quals and experience very, very carefully). The safety issue is because there aren't enough midwives to properly monitor women in labour, so issues aren't picked up on swiftly enough and interventions can happen too late. Yes, if anything does go wrong with private you end up in the same clinical care as NHS, but you end up there more quickly because you get the dedicated attention at an early enough stage. So I would seek private care in an NHS hospital first, and then look at a private midwife (even if not able to intervene in the birth, she could monitor and swiftly raise the alarm if needed) or, more probably, doula.
It's horrific, as someone who strongly believes in the moral imperative of universal health care, free at the point of access, that I am telling a parent to seek private care. But I grew up in Shropshire, and what happened with the maternity scandal there (at a time when they had enough staff - they just had a massive prejudice against medical interventions in birth!) there's also a moral imperative to ensure women and babies are safe in the birthing process.
Finally, yes, Chelsea and Westminster are a good hospital, in my experience, as someone who's had surgery there a couple of times in the past few years. They're rated Good for maternity. The West Middlesex is also not too far away, is part of the same Trust, and they're actually rated Outstanding. I wouldn't be happy to have a baby in a unit rated Inadequate for the most basic issues around safety and cleanliness.
