A damning dossier laid bare the crisis in maternity care - widening the wound left by the pandemic. Six months on from the publication of the biggest review in the history of the NHS, WH asks what impact it’s having on the minds of pregnant women
Tinu Alikor is describing to WH the experience of giving birth to her first child when it occurs to the 39-year-old mother-of-three that the word ‘invisible’ sums up how she felt during each one. She felt invisible when she thought she was being denied pain relief; she felt invisible when, during the first lockdown, she arrived at hospital bleeding, convinced she was having a miscarriage, only to be turned away. Back at home, a shocked woman on the NHS’s 111 line arranged for her to return to the same hospital that had left her feeling scared and vulnerable. Several hours and two blood transfusions later, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Tinu’s experience – defined by an overwhelming feeling of not being heard – is devastating. And yet, her story isn’t likely to surprise you – the reason why contained in eight words that, earlier this year, etched themselves on to the amygdalas of expectant parents everywhere: ‘Childbirth “is not safe for women in England”’.
This was the now-infamous newspaper headline summarising the discoveries of Donna Ockenden, the midwife charged with investigating repeated failures in care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust over two decades. The 250-page report set out Ockenden’s findings from the 304 cases of ‘avoidable harm’ – in which mothers and babies died needlessly and newborns were left severely disabled – before concluding that women in England would not be safe until her recommendations were implemented in full. That such a statement could be made in 2022 was so shocking that then Prime Minister Boris Johnson felt compelled to state in Parliament that, ‘Every woman giving birth has the right to a safe birth.’ And yet, in the seven months since the report was published, UK maternity care has never been far from the headlines.
In May, a year-long inquiry by the charity Birthrights found evidence of Black, brown and mixed ethnicity women giving birth in a discriminatory culture that included microaggressions right through to physical and psychological harm, with more than half of respondents being dismissed, ignored or disbelieved when they raised concerns about their own or their babies’ health. In that same month, a survey by the charity Five X More found that 36% of the 1,300 respondents were dissatisfied with their care during labour, while 52% of those who weren’t given adequate pain relief were not informed why. Even the medical bodies trusted with our care are crying out for relief. A recent survey by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) found that over 80% of midw
