Consequences
Get used to these headlines, you will be seeing more of them.
Medical professionals often point to shortages of trained staff as a reason for the growing numbers of women having bad experiences during maternity.
The picture emerging is that of a vicious circle in which a cash-starved NHS employs fewer trained staff while the number of negligence claims increases, taking even more money from the health services.
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) said there has been an 8 per cent rise in the UK birth-rate at a time when midwifery posts are vacant and many areas have a freeze on recruitment.
Professor Jason Gardosi, a senior obstetrician, said the problems with maternity care in the UK were “endemic”, that the injury and death figures were “the tip of the iceberg” and that substandard medical care was not being detected because of a lack of proper monitoring.
“Staff are doing their best within the confines they are given, but in many instances, mothers and babies only survive because they are lucky,” said Professor Gardosi, director of the NHS Perinatal Institute, an academic research centre.
“The single largest problem is the lack of resources: for example, a lack of ultrasound equipment, followed by a lack of staffing, which allows mistakes to happen. You would not allow an aeroplane to fly without a full crew, but midwives have to make do without a full staff. It is little wonder that we see so many avoidable deaths.”
We want to learn from airline pilots & their error logging systems do we? Then resource and manage what you do have properly first.
But the article does go overboard by trying to link caesarian sections as a cause for the increased number of complications. They seem to forget that caesarian sections are usually a consequence of risky labour & “too posh to push” is confined to a limited subset of pregnant women.
The Times:
What is routinely ignored however, is that caesareans have saved more lives than almost any other surgical procedure in history. Natural childbirth is hugely complicated: the large brain of the baby human is required to pass through the tiny, fixed pelvis of its mother. Haemorraghing, infection and obstruction of labour are all frequent obstacles to safe birth and in the past, childbirth has been the biggest killer of women. Not any more. But unlike the pill, the vote or equal pay, or any of those breakthroughs which have given women control over their lives and their bodies, the caesarean is consistently denigrated.
So NHS maternity care is being restructured. I touched upon this here & here as well.
Especially when you have PCT’s cutting ante-natal classes to save money.
Although financial difficulties have caused cutbacks across many trusts, maternity services have suffered disproportionately, in part encouraged by a government policy suggesting a fewer number of larger centres would be better placed to provide services.
Like this they mean:
The West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the most indebted in the country, and as part of its cost-cutting measures it has abolished ante-natal classes.
First, it was the partners who were told (last December) that they would no longer be able to attend classes. Now pregnant women themselves have had the service removed. Only teenage mothers and women expecting twins are provided with any form of preparatory course.
Maternity wards are understaffed, just as are most wards up & down the country managing on minimum staff numbers, not what are safe or good practice.
And we have just had the horrors of MMC (Mangling / Murdering / Massacring - take your pick - Medical Careers) hit the headlines with thousands of doctors being thrown on the scrap-heap. Before that we saw close to 20,000 doctors of non-EU origin who were working in the NHS asked to leave the country, highlighted here.
24% of maternity units do not have adequate medical support.
10,000+ too few registered midwives.
£1bn+ paid out by the NHS in compensation for maternity-related claims since 2001
The UK now has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in Europe, with 13 deaths per 100,000. Britain ranks below countries including Poland and Hungary, and is above Bulgaria, Bosnia, Belarus, Romania, Armenia and Albania.
Yup, things are going very well indeed.
Have I said before how valuable PR is? See this example.
The Department of Health said that giving birth is “safer now than ever before”
Remember, we just have been told that black is white.
“It was the best year from the patients’ point of view. More people were treated, faster than ever before and more lives were saved than ever before.
Of course it has been a difficult year for staff, as we have had to sort out the large over-spend. But it is now clear we are absolutely back on track to get the NHS into financial balance by the end of the year.”
Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Health
Integrated Service Planning, has anyone heard of it?
March 25th, 2007 at 11:01 am
[...] comes under scrutiny again in the Independent, after the recent front page article. The most important factor in labour was one-to-one continuous care - this came from midwives, [...]