Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Alec. I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing the debate, and I thank everyone in Altrincham and Sale West who signed the petition.
I am especially grateful to those people who wrote to me to bravely share their often harrowing stories of maternity care failures. Their stories were worryingly similar: avoidable trauma, avoidable complications and, in many cases, avoidable tragedy. That is the reality of our maternity services and it is not good enough. There was a common theme behind each of the failings that my constituents suffered, and that was women not being listened to, their pain not being treated as urgent, and their worries being dismissed. That meant that they went without the compassion, care and understanding that they deserved.
Nobody wants better for women and babies than the thousands of NHS midwives and maternity staff who work so hard to ensure that the vast majority of births are safe. It is clear that the system is not working for too many mums, dads and babies. The experience of my constituent Lauren illustrates that. Lauren gave birth at Wythenshawe hospital in January. Her experience was a litany of failures and, in her own words, for all the hard work of NHS staff, she often felt like an afterthought during her own childbirth.
The failings started when Lauren discovered that her baby was in the breech position at 28 weeks. That was not followed up on. When she saw a midwife before the birth, they seemed too busy to check their notes and they thought that the baby was head down. It was not until Lauren was a good way through labour that her medical team were aware that the baby was breech. By that point, it had become an emergency. Lauren, who was in incredible pain, was suddenly surrounded by frantic doctors and midwives asking her questions that she was in no real state to answer, and she was told she had 10 minutes to make a decision on the birth of her baby. She had an emergency C-section, which was supposed to happen within 30 minutes but took two hours, and throughout that time she was without pain relief as overworked midwives desperately tried to care for others. I cannot begin to imagine what her experience was like—the pain, the panic and the unanswered questions leading into one of the biggest procedures that a person can have.
Thankfully, Lauren’s baby was born safely, but it was a birth that did not need to be such a traumatic emergency. Unfortunately, Lauren’s care only got worse after the baby was born. She was dumped in a C-section ward and her partner was forced to leave, meaning she was alone for hours at a time without any pain relief. She was barely able to move, unable to stand up, and unable to respond to her crying baby. At a time of maximum vulnerability she had minimal care. Doctors spoke about her, but they never spoke to her. She had no explanations, no support and, frankly, no one was listening. The ordeal has, completely understandably, put Lauren and her partner off ever having another baby.
Lauren’s experience speaks to so many of the problems that we have heard today: we have a system that is not putting mothers first, that is riven with inequalities and inconsistencies in care, and, for all the Government’s much-welcomed funding, in which staff are overstretched. As someone who works closely with the campaign group the Dad Shift, I also point out how Lauren’s ordeal highlights the way in which dads are often failed by maternity services, with their ability to support their partner undermined as a result. That is particularly true—as it was with Lauren—when mothers have had traumatic births and their partners are still sent home, leaving them without emotional or practical support when they are at their most vulnerable. I hope that the Minister and the Government are looking at that as part of the Government’s much-needed work to turn around our maternity services. I know that that work is progressing, not just through the investigation of Baroness Amos, as we have heard from others, but through the national maternity and neonatal taskforce and through greater funding, support and accountability for underperforming maternity units.
One of those units is at Wythenshawe hospital, which serves my constituents. I will forever be grateful for the care that my partner Catherine and I received at Wythenshawe, where my two sons were born, but I know that that has not been the experience for too many of my constituents.