Women are having ‘distressing’ births because hospitals are covering up failures, MPs report says

Women in labor have been mocked, ignored, fobbed off with paracetamol and left with lasting damage by midwives and doctors, and hospitals have covered up the failures of their staff, a devastating report was found by parliamentarians.

Mothers have been left with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), unable to bond with their babies and too incapacitated to return to work due to horrific experiences of having a child, the first British report has found. research into birth trauma.

Poor maternity care is so common, and its consequences so damaging, that ministers and NHS bosses must make significant changes to the way maternity staff care for the 600,000 women who give birth in England each year, the Parliamentary Group (APPG) has said. consisting of all parties. for birth trauma.

The report outlines how 1,311 women who had suffered traumatic births told the study ‘harrowing’ stories of stillbirth, premature birth or having a baby with cerebral palsy because they were deprived of oxygen during labor, or ending up with life-changing injuries caused by severe injuries. cracks.

“In many of these cases, the trauma was caused by mistakes and failures made before and during childbirth. Often these errors were covered up by hospitals, frustrating parents’ attempts to find answers,” the APPG’s 80-page report said.

“There were also many stories of care without compassion, including women not being listened to when they felt something was wrong, being laughed at or verbally abused, and being denied basic needs such as pain relief.

“Women often felt that they were subjected to interventions that they had not consented to, and many felt that they had not been given enough information to make decisions during birth. The poor quality of postnatal care was an almost universal theme. Women shared stories of being left in bloodstained sheets or ringing the doorbell for help but no one came.”

One in three women who have a child have a traumatic birth, and around 30,000 women a year in Britain – 4% to 5% of those who give birth – develop PTSD, the report said.

Birth trauma leads to “difficulty bonding with the baby, stress on the relationship with the partner and wider family and, often, an inability to return to work”.

Some women told the cross-party group how the injuries they suffered during childbirth had left them with “a lifetime of pain and bowel incontinence. Many of these women could no longer work and described how their injuries had destroyed their self-esteem.

“Other women wrote movingly about having to provide 24-hour care to children left severely disabled by birth injuries,” the MPs said.

Their recommendations include advising the government to appoint a maternity commissioner, reporting to the prime minister; creating specialist postnatal services that provide women with a “safe space to talk about their experiences during childbirth”; forcing hospitals to offer prenatal classes that discuss the risks of childbirth; and provide expectant mothers with pain relief if they request it.

Victoria Atkins, the health minister, promised to draw up a plan to make the system “faster, simpler and fairer” after the “harrowing” stories were revealed.

The investigation was led by Conservative MP Theo Clarke and Labor MP Rosie Duffield.

Amanda Pritchard, chief executive of NHS England, said: “The experiences outlined by women in this report are simply not good enough and not what the NHS wants or expects from patients.”

She said the NHS is making progress in improving maternity care and support for women who have had a traumatic birth. She mentioned the rollout of a network of pelvic health clinics, the expansion of community-based maternal mental health services and a move to ensure GPs offer mothers a check-up of their own physical and mental health six to eight weeks after giving birth, which is separate of monitoring the baby’s health at the same stage.

Maria Caulfield, the Women’s Health Minister, apologized on Monday to mothers affected by birth trauma for the shortcomings in care. She said ministers had long had the wrong approach to maternity care.

“Absolutely,” Caulfield said when asked if an apology should be made. “As Minister for Women’s Health, I recognize that maternity care has not been where we want it to be,” she told Sky News.

The NHS in England spends £1.1 billion a year settling legal claims relating to medical negligence in maternity care, “an eye-watering third of the NHS’s total budget for these services”, the Commons Public Accounts Committee reported week. Ministers had no plan to “reduce the amount of tragedy” caused by medical negligence and the £21 billion in claims facing the NHS, the MPs added.

The Care Quality Commission, the NHS’s care watchdog, said in its annual report last October that care was not good enough in two-thirds of NHS maternity units in England.

Major investigations into shortcomings in maternity care have been carried out over the past decade at three NHS trusts: Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury and Telford, and East Kent. A fourth, on the problems at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, is in preparation.