A Midwife’s Muse

It’s all really quite depressing. Word on the street has it that our Strategic Health Authority wants to get rid of community midwives – to save money, apparently we are an expensive ‘luxury’. If they get their way then women will have to attend clinics for their postnatal care and all antenatal care will be conducted in ‘centres’, somewhere. I heard that piece of gossip just after I had read an entry in The Huffington Post posted by an American Mum praising the maternity services in the UK, and particularly the role of the community midwives. Can this be a case of people sitting around a table not being able to see the wood for the trees? (I can’t find the bloglink at present, when I do I’ll post it). I regularly read complaints from women about not being able to contact ‘their’ midwife. Half the women I ‘book’ at the beginning of their pregnancies grumble about the fact we work 9 – 5, it’s too inconvenient for them. Yes, we do work some weekends, and I do try to schedule a couple of booking appointments for then, but to save money, the Trust have reduced the number of midwives working at the weekend so fitting in hour and a half long visits is now extremely difficult. What about the ‘encouraging women to stay at home’ in early labour? I say to my women that if they are not sure whether to go into hospital then to ring me and I will go round and see how labour is progressing. That service will go. So will the option that my ‘low-risk’ women have of then remaining at home to give birth. It’s all different forces pulling in opposite directions and us midwives are, once again, standing on the sidelines, feeling unsure of our worth, in a type of perpetual limbo, anticipating the next fall of the axe and seeing a service fragment around us.