Scots midwife warns 'systemic problems' in maternity services mean mums aren't receiving proper care

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A senior midwife has warned “systemic problems” in Scotland’s maternity services mean mums are not getting adequate care after birth.

Leah Hazard said pressure on staff to get mothers and babies “quickly out of the door” meant hospitals were often failing to provide the aftercare they need.

As a result, some women were developing infections that could have been prevented or treated sooner if they had been given the proper hospital care.It comes after a survey of nearly 900 Scottish midwives by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) found three quarters were considering leaving the profession.Many cited frustration that they were unable to provide an acceptable quality of care due to staff shortages.Some 50 per cent of midwives surveyed said their department “rarely” had safe staffing levels.Speaking on the Mother Bodies podcast, which launches tomorrow, Hazard said: “Although staff more often than not are very skilled, empathetic, compassionate and hardworking, there is pressure to tick certain boxes and get [mother] and baby safely out the door.“It means that, quite often, women don’t get the time and care they really deserve at that stage when they are really, really vulnerable and have really complex needs.”She said the knock-on effect was that women were more likely to develop health issues when they got home.Hazard added: “Community midwives then have all these people to look after who’ve been ejected from the hospital, probably quite early on, who have issues and complications that maybe could have been prevented had that not been the case.”Hazard, author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story, said the NHS treated maternity services as a whole as a “poor relation” and that years of “chronic underfunding” were to blame