Squeezing the midwives

It would be a mistake to assume that the current trend to dumb down the National Health Service only affected doctors. Whilst use of inadequately trained nurses and others to carry out work that needs medical skills mostly affects doctors or, to be more precise, the doctors’ patients, there is another group of workers in the NHS who are suffering from dumbing down.

The midwives.

Like it or loathe it, for NHS patients who do not wish or cannot afford to pay for a medically trained obstetrician, normal births in the UK are conducted by midwives. Dr Crippen, as regular readers will know, has a lot of trouble accepting the activities of the lunatic fringe of the midwifery profession (the madwives) but it is much harder to criticise the more normal members of midwifery profession who provide the bulk of normal hospital based intra-partum and post-partum obstetric care in the UK.

Our dear government is not, however, going to miss an opportunity to save a few pounds by cutting back on the midwifery profession. How are they going to achieve that? Two strategies have recently come to light.

COMMUNITY midwives at Hinchingbrooke Hospital say they have been betrayed by bosses who have decided to slash their salaries.

Dedicated midwives are set to lose £1,500 a year from their pay packet. In a letter leaked to the News, cash-strapped Hinchingbrooke bosses have announced that community midwives who are now on pay band seven will be moved to a lower band six after a restructure. Bosses want to create new team leader roles for each of the community midwives' four teams. They have invited the 16 midwives in the community section to apply for the roles. The successful applicants will remain on the current band seven, with the rest losing out on the lower pay band. (Full report here)

This invidious, underhand strategy may as yet only be happening in Hinchingbrooke but, make no mistake, if management gets away with it there, many more will follow.

The second strategy is much more worrying and entirely consistent with New Labour dumbing down. Enter the HCA, the “healthcare assistant” (aka in this context “I’m sorry, there is no midwife available today.”) HCAs are cheaper than midwives. When they are pretending to be midwives, HCAs are sometimes called MCAs (“Maternity Care Assistants”) but it is all the same. They are not midwives. They do not have to train for three or more years. They go on the usual two day “skills acquisition” course, eat their bourbon biscuits, get their free pens and a plausible uniform and, suddenly, they can deliver high quality maternity care.

Take a look at the NICE CG37 “Postnatal care - information for the public” which can be found here.

Note how frequently the following words appear:

Doctor 0
Midwife 6
Healthcare Professional 49

You do not have to be a genius to work out where this is heading.

What is the midwives trades union, the Royal College of Midwives, doing about this? Not a lot, it seems. They have much more important matters on which to concentrate. They are currently tied up with Wild Bean Café coffee. Wild Bean coffee is the "accceptable face" of British Petroleum.


Did you see the recent light-hearted advert? The midwife who stopped for a coffee on the way to deliver a baby?

Oh dear me. The RCM does not do “light-hearted”. Remember Louise Silverton? She and her mate, Sue Macdonald, are both prominent madwives and old friends of Dr Crippen (see : British midwives want mothers to suffer). Louise has just issued the following statement:

The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) described references to midwifery made in a recent Wild Bean Café advert as both distasteful and irresponsible. The advert, which has been running on radio and television, features a midwife who jokes that a woman about to give birth will have to wait while she stops off for a coffee at the Wild Bean Café. RCM Deputy General Secretary Louise Silverton said: "This advert is completely insulting and parodies midwifery in the most unacceptable terms." (full story from the RCM here)

Get a life, girls.