Parents have shared their “harrowing” stories to an inquiry into traumatic childbirth leading to calls for an overhaul of maternity and post-natal care.
One woman told the Birth Trauma Inquiry she felt she was treated like a “slab of meat” and a father was left with PTSD after his partner’s traumatic birth.
In Kent, maternity services at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford have been rated as inadequate, as well as those at Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate.
Both hospitals were at the centre of a baby deaths scandal leading to the Kirkup Inquiry which investigated the preventable deaths of 45 infants, 12 babies sustaining brain damage and 23 mothers who died or suffered serious injuries.
Medway Maritime Hospital maternity services have been ranked good.
The Birth Trauma Inquiry, led by Conservative MP Theo Clarke and Labour MP for Canterbury Rosie Duffield, collated stories from more than 1,300 parents and was presented to the Prime Minister this morning.
It has led to calls for the introduction of a maternity commissioner who would speak directly to Rishi Sunak in a bid to outline ways to improve maternity and post-natal care across the UK.
While the majority of the submissions received by parents described births that happened in the past five to 10 years, a minority of submissions came from women still affected by a traumatic birth that happened decades ago and were “profoundly moving”.
“No support was offered to myself or my partner. This experience has left me with regular flashbacks, mental health issues and a diagnosis of PTSD…”
One woman who gave birth in 1973, was not allowed to see her stillborn baby or told whether it was a boy or a girl.
Among the hundreds of stories shared were accounts of stillbirths, premature births, babies born with cerebral palsy caused by oxygen deprivation, and life-changing injuries to women as the result of severe tearing.
Another woman who suffered a stillbirth wrote that in the area in which she lives, there was no specialist maternity loss and trauma service.
“The final kick in the teeth after she died and I was feeling intensely suicidal was that the perinatal mental health team wouldn’t take me on because I had no living baby,” she said.
Meanwhile, Rachael McGrath, from Cheshire, was carrying twins and says she was treated like a “slab of meat” after she was rushed to hospital with an abrupted placenta. After her babies were born under Caesarean section, she became very unwell after “nobody treated the fact that her insides were now on the outside”.
The chairwoman of the Birth Trauma Association said: “They stuck a sanitary towel over my abdomen and left me there for 10 days until eventually…I became gravely ill again.
“It was so impersonal. I would have somebody holding a blood pressure cuff taking my blood pressure and on their phone giggling and texting with the other hand.
“I was in for such a long time and some of the staff would come and get in my room and talk about other patients unkindly and talk about other staff members unkindly.”
Similarly, a father explained how he had been left with PTSD.
“I was sat at the head end of the table with my partner and had no explanation as to what was happening or going on,” he said.
“When my partner started feeling sick and shaking I was literally presented with an anaesthetist sat to my left on her mobile phone and handed a sick bowl and told she will be all right in a minute.
“Prior to that any other requests for information were ignored, all I knew was that alarms were going off and people were running into theatre.
“No support was offered to myself or my partner. This experience has left me with regular flashbacks, mental health issues and a diagnosis of PTSD.”
The report outlines that in many of these cases, the trauma was caused by “mistakes and failures made before and during labour” with these errors often being “covered up by hospitals”.
It adds the poor quality of post-natal care was an “almost universal theme” as women shared stories of being left in blood-stained sheets, or of ringing the bell for help but no one coming.
It also found that women from marginalised groups, particularly those from minoritised ethnic groups, felt they received poor care with some reporting direct or indirect racism.
“The picture to emerge was of a maternity system where poor care is all-too-frequently tolerated as normal, and women are treated as an inconvenience,” the report outlined.
“We have made a set of recommendations that aim to address these problems and work towards a maternity system that is woman-centred and where poor care is the exception rather than the rule.
‘We hope this inquiry will begin a national conversation on birth trauma…’
“Some of the findings in this inquiry – in particular the scale of birth trauma and the devastating impact it has on women and their families – will be new to a lot of people.
“Yet there is much still to be explored, and we hope this inquiry will begin a national conversation on birth trauma.
“Despite being a relatively common experience, the very first time birth trauma was discussed in parliament was in October 2023.
“Now that the taboo has been broken, we hope there will be many more such debates and that birth trauma will be taken seriously.
“We call on the Prime Minister and the UK government to implement our recommendations in full.”
