This is beyond shocking. Seems to mostly be due to a blame culture where things were covered up and ignored in the drive for ‘better’ statistics around natural births. I find it astonishing that nobody at any level noticed the huge discrepancies in Caesarian and stillbirth rates compared to national averages and investigated earlier.
This is beyond scandalous and people should be jailed. Hopefully serious lessons will be learnt, not just in the NHS but also across broader industry. This sort of culture can develop in any company with serious consequences.
Heard a woman on BBC 4 talking about her experience, cant remember the medical terms but baby was bleeding in the womb, had hypothermia when it was born and obviously couldn’t breath properly, took them a couple of days to acknowledge something was wrong and by then it was too late. From the way she described what happened even a lay person would have realised something was seriously wrong, the mother certainly did and was totally ignored.
I can’t understand how this happened once, let alone hundreds of times.
If there is another pandemic & lockdown, I wonder how many people will clap for the godawful NHS?
A couple of points.
This is a shocking situation which shouldn’t have happened.
Hopefully lessons can be learned.
A culture of natural birth at all costs has been pedalled by various organisations. Where the thought of any intervention is painted as a failure. Will these groups and organisations be answerable for the culture they have created. Birth is not a risk free situation we as a society have also forgotten this. That said the complications here were absolutely shocking.
The NHS is underfunded, staff numbers are shockingly low, staff pay and well being have plummeted. This is only going to get worse without proper funding and staffing.
People are happy to bash the NHS and i can see why. But maybe consider why it’s in the state it is and I can assure you it’s not due to the individuals.
This is going to be the very tip of the iceberg in regards to avoidable deaths in the NHS. Negligence payouts are going up at a shocking rate and there is a lot of disquiet in chronically ill communities about appalling treatment. The war on opioid drugs for treatment of pain has hurt and disabled a lot of people and if it wasn’t for how unwell these people are there would be a lot more noise about it. But long covid is exposing a lot of patients to the NHS and its awful treatment of those with fatigue and other symptoms where they are treated as depressed and dismissed and the consequences are going to be a big rise in malpractice suites once there is a treatment they can seek.
This well goes a lot deeper, on a range of conditions the NHS regularly performs exceptionally poorly.
This is honestly no surprise. My Girlfriend and family live in the area and the healthcare system is completely and utterly fucked.
They make you sign a document when dosed up so you can’t sue them after they botch the epidural leaving you with back problems. Purposefully throw you around when you have just been in a car crash and later it’s found out that you broke your back… and still release you when you can’t move and delay physio. Can’t locate a googlie eye located in 3 year olds ear after the GP found it within 5 seconds. Delay a kidney flush for 3 years and then only act after you end up in A&E, again released very early because fuck recovery.
And this is only a small portion of the stories I’ve heard.. from one bloody family.
Guarantee nobody will go to prison and lose their pension…….but lessons will be learned.
If a Lorry driver was equally incompetent and killed one baby let alone 200 he would go to prison.
Sadly not surprised by this. I gave birth to my first child at Shrewsbury hospital in 2002 and the midwife turned the sound off on the baby heart monitor while she read a magazine. When she eventually took a look all hell broke loose and I ended up having a ventouse delivery.
Earlier there was post here and everyone blaming the tories for all things related to a loss of faith in the nhs…
The NHS has been learning “serious lessons” for a long time and nothing ever changes… I lost my baby boy 17 years ago this year because nurses and doctors thought I was an “hysterical first time mum” and it looks like they are still no better.
I really wish they’d look at other trusts. I lost my son 9 years ago this week due to the negligence of a consultant who replied himself to my complaint saying he was right. They changed their policy because of my son but never admitted they caused his death. This isn’t just Shropshire
The birth of my daughter gave both my wife and me PTSD. This wasn’t even in this hospital or trust. Time and time again my wife said something isn’t right but she was constantly ignored, told by the midwives that she isn’t in pain and doesn’t know what pain is because she didn’t want to pain killer they tried to give her. My wife was induced because the baby had reduced movements and we were in hospital for 3 days before the birth when initially told it would be 24 hours, time and time again they told her she would be next to go to the birthing suite. In the end they put a probe on the babies head and found she was critically low on oxygen and was nearly delivered by emergency C-section, by the time we got to the theatre she was fully dilated and the baby was born by forceps and appeasiotmy(sp). The baby then struggle to breathe and had low SATS and ended up in NICU for a few hours. Luckily she is now a happy and healthy 3.5 year old.
People go easy on the NHS because it’s “free” and “amazing” etc etc.
It’s an appalling service, if it was a private company with competition it would have gone under years ago. Huge elements of how it operates and interacts with the patients is still stuck in the pre-internet era, all letters and phonecalls. It’s embarrassing.
If I could stop paying NI I would contribute extra % of my wages to go private in a heartbeat. Sadly I’m being forced to pay even more into a repeatedly failing system.
We had our children at these two hospitals and had no idea these failings were occuring. Its sickening to think something unnecessarilu awful could have happened. I feel so sorry for those who unfortunately have been through hell due to the incompetence shown.
Reading up about the insistence on natural births, my wife was pregnant with twins and the bottom one was breach. At Telford, the woman in charge (I forget her official title) pressed so hard for a natural birth and championed the hospital’s ability to safely perform such a thing.
Luckily my wife fought and fought for a C-section as she said there was no way she was going through the trauma of a breach birth only to have to – while exhausted and sore – deliver the second baby.
The woman just wouldn’t listen for so long, until we specifically told her we would go to another hospital if we had to. It’s scary how we could have been included in this sad story had we not stood our ground.
Police are now investigating. Hopefully, some midwives, still working, or retired, will be charged with manslaughter. Then again, NHS staff cover their backs. Just look at what happened to the nurses, who presided over the horrors, that took place at Mid-Staffs. No nurse was arrested, or charged, with manslaughter, even though patients died.
The NHS disgusts me.
So now the strangling of funds and overworking of staff to warm the public to selling the NHS is literally killing the sons and daughters of the nation. This is not a situation that is impossible to mitigate, its targeted terrorism in the name of fucking greed!
I know a girl haunted by this. The pain she showed for years left a serious effect on our workplace. It looked like her heart was torn out, and to find it wasn’t her fault must create such rage.
Some of this can of course be put down to funding and government support which any fool can acknowledge has plummeted over the last 15 or so years.
But…
The infallible culture of the NHS is utterly corrosive at times. For the largest single employer in the country to be so immune from day to day general criticism because of the “angels” that work there (for money) and the fact that it’s “free” (which it isn’t) can leas to situations like this.
We should have enough pride in our healthcare TO lodge valid criticism when necessary, and expect dignified and patient led treatment
19 comments
This is beyond shocking. Seems to mostly be due to a blame culture where things were covered up and ignored in the drive for ‘better’ statistics around natural births. I find it astonishing that nobody at any level noticed the huge discrepancies in Caesarian and stillbirth rates compared to national averages and investigated earlier.
This is beyond scandalous and people should be jailed. Hopefully serious lessons will be learnt, not just in the NHS but also across broader industry. This sort of culture can develop in any company with serious consequences.
Heard a woman on BBC 4 talking about her experience, cant remember the medical terms but baby was bleeding in the womb, had hypothermia when it was born and obviously couldn’t breath properly, took them a couple of days to acknowledge something was wrong and by then it was too late. From the way she described what happened even a lay person would have realised something was seriously wrong, the mother certainly did and was totally ignored.
I can’t understand how this happened once, let alone hundreds of times.
If there is another pandemic & lockdown, I wonder how many people will clap for the godawful NHS?
A couple of points.
This is a shocking situation which shouldn’t have happened.
Hopefully lessons can be learned.
A culture of natural birth at all costs has been pedalled by various organisations. Where the thought of any intervention is painted as a failure. Will these groups and organisations be answerable for the culture they have created. Birth is not a risk free situation we as a society have also forgotten this. That said the complications here were absolutely shocking.
The NHS is underfunded, staff numbers are shockingly low, staff pay and well being have plummeted. This is only going to get worse without proper funding and staffing.
People are happy to bash the NHS and i can see why. But maybe consider why it’s in the state it is and I can assure you it’s not due to the individuals.
This is going to be the very tip of the iceberg in regards to avoidable deaths in the NHS. Negligence payouts are going up at a shocking rate and there is a lot of disquiet in chronically ill communities about appalling treatment. The war on opioid drugs for treatment of pain has hurt and disabled a lot of people and if it wasn’t for how unwell these people are there would be a lot more noise about it. But long covid is exposing a lot of patients to the NHS and its awful treatment of those with fatigue and other symptoms where they are treated as depressed and dismissed and the consequences are going to be a big rise in malpractice suites once there is a treatment they can seek.
This well goes a lot deeper, on a range of conditions the NHS regularly performs exceptionally poorly.
This is honestly no surprise. My Girlfriend and family live in the area and the healthcare system is completely and utterly fucked.
They make you sign a document when dosed up so you can’t sue them after they botch the epidural leaving you with back problems. Purposefully throw you around when you have just been in a car crash and later it’s found out that you broke your back… and still release you when you can’t move and delay physio. Can’t locate a googlie eye located in 3 year olds ear after the GP found it within 5 seconds. Delay a kidney flush for 3 years and then only act after you end up in A&E, again released very early because fuck recovery.
And this is only a small portion of the stories I’ve heard.. from one bloody family.
Guarantee nobody will go to prison and lose their pension…….but lessons will be learned.
If a Lorry driver was equally incompetent and killed one baby let alone 200 he would go to prison.
Sadly not surprised by this. I gave birth to my first child at Shrewsbury hospital in 2002 and the midwife turned the sound off on the baby heart monitor while she read a magazine. When she eventually took a look all hell broke loose and I ended up having a ventouse delivery.
Earlier there was post here and everyone blaming the tories for all things related to a loss of faith in the nhs…
The NHS has been learning “serious lessons” for a long time and nothing ever changes… I lost my baby boy 17 years ago this year because nurses and doctors thought I was an “hysterical first time mum” and it looks like they are still no better.
I really wish they’d look at other trusts. I lost my son 9 years ago this week due to the negligence of a consultant who replied himself to my complaint saying he was right. They changed their policy because of my son but never admitted they caused his death. This isn’t just Shropshire
The birth of my daughter gave both my wife and me PTSD. This wasn’t even in this hospital or trust. Time and time again my wife said something isn’t right but she was constantly ignored, told by the midwives that she isn’t in pain and doesn’t know what pain is because she didn’t want to pain killer they tried to give her. My wife was induced because the baby had reduced movements and we were in hospital for 3 days before the birth when initially told it would be 24 hours, time and time again they told her she would be next to go to the birthing suite. In the end they put a probe on the babies head and found she was critically low on oxygen and was nearly delivered by emergency C-section, by the time we got to the theatre she was fully dilated and the baby was born by forceps and appeasiotmy(sp). The baby then struggle to breathe and had low SATS and ended up in NICU for a few hours. Luckily she is now a happy and healthy 3.5 year old.
People go easy on the NHS because it’s “free” and “amazing” etc etc.
It’s an appalling service, if it was a private company with competition it would have gone under years ago. Huge elements of how it operates and interacts with the patients is still stuck in the pre-internet era, all letters and phonecalls. It’s embarrassing.
If I could stop paying NI I would contribute extra % of my wages to go private in a heartbeat. Sadly I’m being forced to pay even more into a repeatedly failing system.
We had our children at these two hospitals and had no idea these failings were occuring. Its sickening to think something unnecessarilu awful could have happened. I feel so sorry for those who unfortunately have been through hell due to the incompetence shown.
Reading up about the insistence on natural births, my wife was pregnant with twins and the bottom one was breach. At Telford, the woman in charge (I forget her official title) pressed so hard for a natural birth and championed the hospital’s ability to safely perform such a thing.
Luckily my wife fought and fought for a C-section as she said there was no way she was going through the trauma of a breach birth only to have to – while exhausted and sore – deliver the second baby.
The woman just wouldn’t listen for so long, until we specifically told her we would go to another hospital if we had to. It’s scary how we could have been included in this sad story had we not stood our ground.
Police are now investigating. Hopefully, some midwives, still working, or retired, will be charged with manslaughter. Then again, NHS staff cover their backs. Just look at what happened to the nurses, who presided over the horrors, that took place at Mid-Staffs. No nurse was arrested, or charged, with manslaughter, even though patients died.
The NHS disgusts me.
So now the strangling of funds and overworking of staff to warm the public to selling the NHS is literally killing the sons and daughters of the nation. This is not a situation that is impossible to mitigate, its targeted terrorism in the name of fucking greed!
I know a girl haunted by this. The pain she showed for years left a serious effect on our workplace. It looked like her heart was torn out, and to find it wasn’t her fault must create such rage.
Some of this can of course be put down to funding and government support which any fool can acknowledge has plummeted over the last 15 or so years.
But…
The infallible culture of the NHS is utterly corrosive at times. For the largest single employer in the country to be so immune from day to day general criticism because of the “angels” that work there (for money) and the fact that it’s “free” (which it isn’t) can leas to situations like this.
We should have enough pride in our healthcare TO lodge valid criticism when necessary, and expect dignified and patient led treatment