Marching for Midwives happened in London yesterday, 20th November, 2022. The Midwives are marching to end the crisis facing maternity care.
My son was born in a lovely maternity home with 35 beds in 1983, since then they sold off the site to property developers because the maternity home was on a prime site and the midwives said it wasn't fit for purpose. In other words, it hadn't been upgraded and redeveloped to bring it into the 21st century.
However, what did our location receive instead? Maternity was moved to the main hospital and given a ward of 11 beds instead. This happened during the largest expansion of the population nationally and in our location being the fastest growing town in Europe.
So we now have one third of the beds that we had 40 years ago. If you talk to people that have worked in the NHS during the last 40 years; they will also tell you that the reduction in beds has been going on since the 1980s. Overall, in the NHS we have nearly 2/3rd less beds than we had in the late 80s. At the same time has a population explosion. Then you have health tourism on top of that. People that come into the country to have their babies, then go home again afterwards.
There is a chronic shortage of midwives, and our midwives are highly trained. First they do their nursing qualifications, then they have to train in midwifery. Two elder English midwives that I knew went onto become Health Visitors. So that was three lots of training.
No comments:
Post a Comment