Maternity wards in crisis: the 'shocking' birth trauma report

The cross-party inquiry into birth trauma was led by a campaigner with first-hand knowledge of the issue, said The Guardian. When Theo Clarke, the Tory MP for Stafford, gave birth to her first child in 2022, she suffered a third-degree tear and heavy blood loss during a 40-hour labour, followed by surgery without a general anaesthetic. "I really thought I was going to die," she told the BBC last year. 

Her inquiry's report, published on Monday, shows that hers was a far from isolated case. Drawing on expert evidence and the personal testimony of 1,300 women, it "vividly conveys" the cost of failures in NHS maternity services. About 30,000 women each year – one in 20 new mothers – are diagnosed with post-traumatic disorder.

"Harrowing" accounts highlight how mistakes and failures lead to stillbirths, premature births, babies being born with cerebral palsy, and life-changing injuries to women as the result of severe tearing; how mothers are mocked, shouted at, denied proper pain relief, not kept informed, and left alone in blood-stained sheets, their desperate calls for help going unanswered.

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A failure to listen

"All of this is shocking," said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. Or it ought to be. Yet anyone who read the Ockenden Review of maternity services in Shrewsbury and Telford, or the review of East Kent maternity and neo-natal services, or the Morecambe Bay report, "will recognise the same pattern": the failure to listen, the lack of compassion, the "casual cruelty", the tendency to cover up mistakes, the apparent inability to learn from them. 

Women and babies, the report finds, too often seem like "an inconvenience" in the delivery of maternity services. This is "a story of women treated with profound personal cruelty", said Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman. But the crisis in maternity care is also a vast economic problem: "traumatic births are costing the country billions". In 2022-23, NHS England spent £1.1bn on clinical negligence payments related to maternity. Its entire budget for maternity and neonatal services is only £3bn.

Another 'postcode lottery'

What can be done to solve this intractable problem, asked Denis Campbell in The Guardian. The MPs acknowledge that, in maternity care, overwork and understaffing are "endemic". Their first, and most important, recommendation is that there must be a new strategy to "recruit, train and retain" more midwives, obstetricians and anaesthetists. However, at present, more staff are leaving midwifery than joining it; there are actually 48 fewer NHS midwives in England than in 2019. 

Even so, these failures "must end", said The Times. The report finds that good-quality care for pregnant women is "the exception rather than the rule"; deaths in the first year of life are higher than in most developed nations. To become pregnant in Britain is "to enter a postcode lottery of NHS services in which losers are at an enhanced risk of injury or death. This is a scarcely believable scandal."