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wthe hat is wrong with maternal and newborn careThis is a question that, even after many high-profile cases of failure and sometimes life-changing experiences of thousands of mothers and their babies, remains frustratingly unclear.
It is not the case that care for mothers and infants is uniformly poor, but it is also not the case that truly poor outcomes are so rare as to be considered exceptional.
Excellent examples can also be found, but not enough. The severity of the deficiencies is wide-ranging – from dirty wards and hungry patients, to women left to “bleed out” in the bathroom, to brutally inconsiderate staff, to avoidable deaths of infants.
This is how the latest report from England paints the picture motherhood Wards and specialist units point to inconsistency, and a high number of cases “Unacceptable care” will lead to “tragic” consequences,
Valerie Amos, who leads the National Maternal and Newborn Investigation (NMNI), says she still doesn’t have full answers as to what has caused such a dire situation in this particular area. NHS , But at least the scale of the challenge has been identified,
coming from outside the NHSBaroness Amos, who has a background in government and academia, is to be congratulated for working with such impressive speed to uncover the everyday – but still shocking – story of neglect and abuse that could amount to abuse.
She admits that such unfamiliarity meant that “nothing prepared me for the scale of unacceptable care that women and families have received, and are receiving, with tragic consequences for their children, and the impact on their mental, physical and emotional well-being”.
A failure is clearly a matter of bureaucracy and lack of managerial and political drive in the face of obvious problems. media, Involved IndependentThere are broken stories on a depressing series of scams in NHS trusts in recent years. Each has shocked the nation. Even now, the situation at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust remains so serious that the Health Secretary has had to deal with it separately, Wes StreetingAnd taken out of Baroness Amos’s jurisdiction.
The same applies for Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS TrustA place where matters are so serious that the Trust is still being investigated by West Mercia Police.
Investigation after investigation, thorough and professional, have been conducted across various trusts, and yet, as Baroness Amos notes, it is a scandal in itself that the NHS machine has failed to implement a total of 748 recommendations for improvement made by various audits. She rightly asks why managers and physicians are struggling to provide safe, reliable maternity and newborn care.
One reason for this may be that there has been less investment in children and maternity services compared to other services. This, in turn, may stem from deep-seated but The invisible tendency towards unconscious misogyny on their partIt is usually men who allocate money and resources in a system largely run by women for women.
In this context, it is also troubling that Baroness Amos has already revealed discriminatory treatment against women of colour, working-class women, younger parents and women with mental health problems.
This is not the first time an official inquiry has looked at this kind of issue – it was also a disparity that came to attention during the pandemic, and it clearly raises some uncomfortable questions about what is happening on the wards. This inappropriate behavior is a finding that cannot be attributed to a lack of investment in staffing or equipment – but it probably points to more insidious cultural factors.
The NMNI has not sought to replicate previous investigations into individual trusts, still not acting like a police force, but has visited 12 trusts to assess what routine maternity and newborn care looks like, and they appear to have been open and transparent about their problems.
Care may be exemplary, but often is not. Issues such as negligent staff, mothers’ protests being ignored and a certain tendency to become complacent are things every NHS trust can urgently address. For example, the Royal College of Midwives say they have been warning for years about the dangers and lack of “ring-fenced” funding for specialist care.
The maternity task force that Mr Streeting has assembled should already have a very good idea of what action should be taken, and he has an energetic and forceful Secretary of State to support him. By the time Baroness Amos publishes her final report next year, the taskforce should be in a position to demonstrate concrete improvements. There is no time to waste.
Furthermore, it would be one of the greatest achievements of Mr. Streeting’s career if he could guarantee that every Woman Having a baby in an NHS hospital will feel safe. It doesn’t seem like a big promise, but it would be great.