The NHS’s maternity care has always been a mess

The latest report on maternity care in the UK hasn’t told us anything new. The headline finding of the parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma is that poor care is ‘all-too frequently tolerated as normal’, with women’s concerns and requests for pain relief being dismissed, poor postnatal care where women who couldn’t move after surgery were berated by midwives for having soiled themselves or for asking for help, and a failure of hospitals to deal sensitively with complaints about poor care.

All of this is shocking. Yet anyone who has read the Ockenden Review of the maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust or the Kirkup review of East Kent maternity and neonatal services, or indeed Kirkup report into Morecambe Bay NHS will recognise the same pattern: a service that seems to operate with itself in mind, rather than the women in it.

This has largely been the case since the inception of the NHS: it’s just that the ideology over birth has swung around a bit.