Midwives, nurses and doctors in hospitals are fighting a much tougher battle than me and my pharmacy but we should never cut corners in maternity and neonatal care, says Peter Kelly…

In April, my girlfriend gave birth to a baby boy. I personally thought the hospital care was pretty good. My girlfriend was not as convinced. She felt some of the communication and bedside manner was lacking.

She felt it would have been much better if she had the same midwife the entire way through the birth which, as I understand, was once the norm prior to austerity.

Here’s an example of the bad communication: she had an emergency caesarean section and was told a doctor would come to look at her scar within a certain period of time. That period of time passed and no doctor had shown up.

Nobody was able to give an answer as to when a doctor might take a look, so I took a look and it seemed fine and seemed to be healing well.

However, my girlfriend had a sense that something did not feel right about it and wanted reassurance from someone better informed on c-section scars, which was totally understandable.

We then heard a doctor with the patient in the next room, so my girlfriend stood outside the door and grabbed the doctor as she was leaving the other patient.

The doctor informed her that she needed to be somewhere else but my girlfriend was not taking no for an answer and, fair play to the doctor, she took a look at the scar and put her mind at ease.

Before the birth, we attended baby preparation classes and we’re now in a WhatsApp group with 10 couples who have just had babies. I’m not sure any of them are happy with the care they received. Poor communication was a common complaint.

I felt a little like defending NHS staff. Being abrupt, poorly communicating, feeling a little impatient with patients and looking for reassurance: I have been guilty of all of these things myself in the pharmacy.

I know what it feels like to have years of stagnant wages, understaffing and increasing workload.

I’m also self-aware enough to realise that midwives, nurses and doctors in the hospital are fighting a much tougher battle than me and my pharmacy colleagues. I have huge sympathy for the staff and, if I am honest, thought my girlfriend was being a little unfair.

I then became hyper-aware of any articles about maternity care. I discovered the Conservative MP Theo Clarke had championed a parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma as she herself had experienced inadequate care when she gave birth.

The report found there had been “shockingly poor quality” in maternity services. It also said that “poor care is all too frequently tolerated as normal.” The report went on. “Women shared stories of being left in blood-stained sheets or of ringing the bell for help but no-one coming.” 

You do not need a PhD in women’s health to see that this all indicated a severe lack of staffing.

Here’s a crazy statistic for you: Over £1,000,000,000 (or a third) of the NHS’s total maternity and neonatal budget was spent on cash payments relating to clinical negligence in 2022-2023.

Here is another: brain damage to babies in birth has cost the NHS in England £4.1 billon in lawsuits in the last 11 years. Can you imagine owning a business where a third of your budget was paid out as compensation for mistakes?

There is only one way to describe this: systematic failure.

The next article that caught my eye in relation to this was a controversial one in the New Yorker magazine about the nurse Lucy Letby. Letby has been handed 15 life sentences for the murder and attempted murder of babies in her care.

It presents the case for her innocence. It challenges all the evidence against her. The New Yorker thinks she is innocent, the British justice system thinks she is guilty.

Having read the article, I cannot say with 100 per cent certainty if she is innocent or guilty but on the balance of probabilities, I’m leaning towards innocent. The article paints a picture of a maternity unit providing chaotic care.

These were not the only babies to have died or nearly died in an NHS hospital over the last 10 years and Letby was not in the other hospitals. The NHS is not paying out billions in lawsuits solely because of Letby.

And after the Post Office Horizon scandal, my faith in British justice is far from absolute. Justice aside, the article describes a frightening picture of under-staffing. We should never be cutting corners in maternity and neonatal care.

Adequate funding should be ring-fenced and triple-locked. Birth trauma is putting women off having more babies and that is a terrible indictment of a rich country like Great Britain.

Peter Kelly is a pharmacist based in London and a stand-up comedian.