Maternity care in UK on verge of breakdown, says top midwife

[Geee]

UK Guardian:

Maternity services are close to breaking point and care for mothers is worsening, the UK's leading midwife warns in a dramatic plea over the declining state of childbirth on the NHS.

Labour wards are struggling to give women the proper quality of care under the "relentless" pressure of a record birth rate, staff shortages and increasingly complex births, says Cathy Warwick, general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives.

Writing in the Observer, Warwick warns that the situation in maternity units is so grave that the safety of women giving birth is under threat. Midwives, she says, "are deeply anxious about the care being delivered. They believe that the service they are giving to women and babies is deteriorating and that safety is too often being compromised. The service is teetering on the brink; the cracks are beginning to appear."

Midwives "are on the edge of our capacity to cope", with extremely busy days, once the exception, now the norm, she adds: "Midwives cannot carry on working like this day in and day out, often without breaks, and continue to practise safely." There are too few midwives to ensure that every delivery is as safe as it should be, she warns.

Warwick's remarks have prompted fresh concern about whether ongoing shortages of midwives in many units is affecting the experience of the 98% of women who have their children in hospital. They come amid rising concern about maternity safety. Yesterday the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Dr Tony Falconer, claimed that the NHS offered an inferior service to women who give birth at night to those who deliver during the day, when staff on duty make better decisions because they are more experienced.

[pollyannaish]

Declining infant/mother birth rates have contributed enormously to the increase in life expectancy in the western world. This is a tragedy.

[Al_Simmons]

The record birthrate is driven by Moslems and other non-British south-of-the-Equator immigrants.

 

Before the end of this century Britain will once again descend into the barbarism from whence it originally came.