2.1 The Care Never Comes

    ‘You rely on those tasked with your care - but the care never comes’

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    The stories frequently had an ‘us and them’ feel to them, with women describing feeling unsupported and isolated - ‘nobody spoke to me…nobody comforted me when I started to shake and haemorrhage and vomit’,‘I was even told that I couldn’t have a shower…I was left waiting in a triage waiting room for my husband to collect me in blood stained PJs’… 

At a particularly vulnerable time, women reported feeling abandoned by the staff around them ’39 hours of being ignored and scared’, ‘I felt very abandoned and scared…just completely uncared for’. Women felt pushed and pressured during birth, ‘we had to keep the doctors at bay who were pushing for intervention’, ‘from the very beginning I felt pressured and rushed’.  Related to this, there was a sense that their own instincts were not being listened to ‘This was the first time she even thought about checking how dilated I was…I was ready to push’, ‘after lots of pleading that something wasn’t right…they asked a paediatrician to check [my son] over…we’d both got sepsis’, 

‘I was told to trust medical professionals over my own instinct’ 

Women sometimes felt in the middle of disagreements between staff, ‘midwives were arguing’, ‘raised voices’, ‘one doctor telling me to push, midwife telling me to stop’. They also reported hearing how they were being spoken about, which could be disturbing when concerns were being raised ‘Dr shouting he couldn’t find a swab inside me’, ‘awareness of the surgeon struggling’, ‘the surgeon was saying [about my placenta] ‘it’s piecemeal’.

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There were examples of staff being rude, hostile or even verbally abusive ‘Doctor began screaming at me to push’, ‘The doctor…humiliated me’, ‘She continually rolled her eyes at me’, ‘She was talking about me as if I wasn't there’. There was a lack of trust that professionals had the women’s best interests at heart, including after birth when there were a number of cases when note keeping had not been accurate: ‘She told us her shift was finishing at 7:30 and my little boy was born at 7:24pm - coincidence?’, ‘The ward nurses came and literally kicked me out of bed at 8am’, ‘there was nothing in the notes’, ‘none of this was recorded by the midwife’. 

Women were also disappointed by the stories they’d heard before birth, with a sense that antenatal classes need to be more honest about the more negative possibilities of birth ‘The expectation that every woman can have a normal birth sets women up to feel rubbish post fatally if she can’t’, ‘don’t hide the truth on what to expect…could have explained how likely assistance will be, how pain relief is perfectly acceptable’, ‘Would have been easier if I’d never gone on the [hypnobirthing] course and instead spoken to women who’d had different kinds of births’.