A former midwife has told how she left the NHS due to “overwhelming” pressure which left her fearing an imminent clinical accident.
Piroska Cavell, 55, from Whitstable, Kent, left in 2019 after working in the health service for a decade.
She is one of many people who have left the profession due to a “harmful work culture”, including excessive workloads and bullying from colleagues, fueling staff shortages in NHS hospitals.
Mrs Cavell said Radio 4’s Today program: ‘I got to the point where I saw my record flashing before my eyes every day. I was literally waiting for something to happen: a negative situation due to circumstances beyond my control.
Former midwife Piroska Cavell left the NHS after a decade of service due to overwhelming pressure and now runs a private wellness centre.
A parliamentary report this week revealed the crisis at the heart of the NHS maternity system
‘Staffing is one of the main areas of pressure because you can’t be in two areas at once.
‘You would be one of three midwives who have to look after the delivery room, the prenatal room or the triage room. Motherhood is like A&E: you never know what’s coming and it keeps coming.
‘Sometimes it’s overwhelming. There are nights when it’s not so overwhelming, but they are very rare.
‘Obviously, everyone wants you to be there with them, and you want to be with them. It’s not great when you have to leave someone to go care for someone else, but we don’t have the resources to allow for more personalized care.
“There’s a lot of talk about it, but it never really happens.”
He added that dealing with many different patients at the same time is extremely difficult and can lead to mistakes being made.
“Very often you find yourself in a situation where you are taking care of someone who is going through a normal birth, and everything is great, and in the next room you are taking care of someone who is going through the process of losing their child. baby,’ she said. ‘You’re one person. You have to remember what energy to bring to each room.’
Cavell said she still loves midwifery work but could not be tempted to return to the NHS.
“It is very difficult to leave midwifery because it is a very privileged profession,” she said. “I still dream of giving birth, but I don’t think anything can tempt me to do it again. They have to study recruiting to make it more attractive.”
Birte Harlev-Lam, of the Royal College of Midwifery, said health services are losing “quite a significant number” of students during their training, mainly due to financial pressures.
“We also see midwives who find themselves in a situation where they simply cannot continue doing the work they love,” she said. “We need to stop the leaky bucket, stop midwives leaving and think about what we can do to make them feel safe at work and able to provide the care they have been trained to provide.”
It comes after the UK’s first parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma found this week that there is “shockingly poor quality” in maternity services, stating that good care is “the exception rather than the rule”.
She heard testimony from more than 1,300 women, including new mothers who were left lying on blood-covered sheets for hours and even scolded by midwives for soiling themselves.
A report revealed a culture of bullying and the “devastating impact” of understaffing, few resources, low-quality care and poor communication.
A former midwife told the inquiry she left the NHS in 2022 after 15 years due to “cumulative vicarious trauma and moral injury”.
She described working in a particularly hierarchical maternity unit where a consultant obstetrician behaved aggressively towards staff and treated women in his care inappropriately.
In one case, during repair of a second-degree perineal tear, he said the woman “was jumping on the bed and moaning in pain from the stitches.” I asked him to stop and ease my pain further; She yelled at me in front of the woman and told me that ‘women don’t have nerves in their vaginas.’
She also described an “extraordinary incident” when the same doctor “dragged another outspoken midwife down the hallway of an prenatal clinic by her hair.”
On her last NHS shift, she described caring for a mother whose baby was stillborn before being called to an emergency forceps delivery in which “the woman was screaming with fear and panic in her eyes, the obstetrician was useless in his communication.” and did not obtain consent for episiotomy or forceps. The result was “another unnecessarily traumatized mother and father entering parenthood.”
Gill Walton, chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives, said: “Sadly, not all birth experiences are positive and bad experiences can have a devastating impact on a woman and should be taken very seriously as a threat to physical and mental health. of the mother and the baby. welfare.
‘The women who shared their experiences with the research should be praised for doing so and we owe it to them to learn and improve from the failures that occurred in their care.
‘Without a doubt, staff shortages dramatically affect the safety and quality of care that midwives are able and willing to provide.
‘Our own members tell us they are fighting to give women the time and quality of care they need and deserve.
‘Furthermore, with the rise in more complex pregnancies, having the right mix of skills in staff on duty is key.
‘Access to adequate training has also been highlighted in this report and, when there are not enough midwives, crucial training is often postponed and this affects the preparedness that staff can have not only for emergency situations, but also for improvements in day-to-day motherhood. “Medical care can be achieved.”
Donna Ockenden, who is chairing an inquiry into shortcomings in maternity care in Nottingham, told the parliamentary inquiry that NHS staff waste too much time dealing with bureaucracy.
She said: ‘Leaders of maternity services report ongoing requests for information from multiple bodies responsible for the ‘oversight’ of maternity care in the UK.
‘Applications are often duplicated or slightly different, demonstrating ineffective coordination between these multiple agencies.
‘This is not efficient and a waste of time. The system of supervision of maternity services must be rationalized and made more effective.’
The Department of Health and Social Care said there were 23,631 full-time equivalent midwives working in NHS Trusts and other central organizations in England in February this year, an increase of 4,184 (21.5 per cent) compared to the same month of 2010.