The Scandal of NHS Maternity Care

When I talk about "The Failure of Conventional Medicine", as I often do, it is not an academic event, that has no impact on our lives; it is demonstrated by what has happened to our health during the last 70 years, and more. It is about the epidemic levels of chronic disease from which we are now suffering. It is about the spectacular lack of success in how we treat infections. It is about the creation of illness caused by conventional medical treatment, and particularly through adverse drug and vaccine effects.

It is also about a medical system that has failed to keep patients safe from serious harm, and has actually caused direct harm and death on patients.

This harm has been amply demonstrated today, when the Ockenden Report on the maternity practices at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust over the last 20 years was published. The commercial media has been obliged to report on this awful catalogue of failure. But it has sought to describe this saga of failure as a 'one-off', a situation caused by 'bad practice', the result of professional 'errors' and 'mistakes'.

The Ockenden Report describes the catastrophic failure at an NHS Trust that led to the unnecessary deaths of 200 babies, 9 mothers, and other children who were left with permanent, life-changing injuries.

The situation at Shrewsbury and Telford is certainly not a one-off. It follows the Morecambe Bay Investigation in September 2013 into serious incidents in the maternity department at the Furness General Hospital (FGH) between 2004 and 2013. The report concluded that the maternity unit was 'dysfunctional', that there were "serious failures of clinical care" that "led to unnecessary deaths of mothers and babies". It made 44 recommendations, both for the Trust and the wider NHS, "aimed at ensuring the failings are properly recognised and acted upon". Presumably these recommendations had little impact on Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust.

There have been other smaller, but similar investigations. For instance, Basildon University Hospital, part of the Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, is currently under investigation when a third woman died during childbirth at a hospital's maternity unit in just three years. A BBC article outlines the scale of the problem. In the last 10 years the Trust has paid out over £103m in compensation over 'failings' in its maternity department. It states that this Trust has the highest number of successful clinical negligence claims of any NHS provider, and that "a Trust spokesman said the maternity payments related to cases which could have happened over a 20-year period". The clinical negligence claims related to 36 mother and baby deaths, 31 babies with brain damage, 24 with cerebral palsy and 27 stillbirths.

Predictably, the mainstream media has presented each case in isolation; but they are clearly not 'isolated' cases. So rather than look at the real reasons for these successive failures, they have had to find other 'scapegoats'. It is the shortage of midwives. It involves 'poor staff cultures' at specific maternity units. 

And, of course, this is about the 'errors' or 'mistakes' of members of the staff; or poor management. Each of these cases will lead, and already have led to the expenditure of yet more resources being poured into the same old medicine.

Never is it asked - is the system of medicine that completely dominates NHS maternity care, at fault?

Are these situations arising because conventional medicine is inherently dangerous? But assumed to be entirely safe?

Maternity care has been increasingly medicalised, from the 1960's onwards, since the days that have been dramatised in the BBC's "Call the Midwife" series. No longer is delivering babies in the NHS the realm of midwives. 

AIMS, the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services, founded in 1960, "have campaigned tirelessly for improvements to the UK's maternity services, as well as supporting women and families directly through our helpline, and sharing information to pregnant people and health carers ....." This is what AIMS says about 'The Medicalisation of Birth'.

            "Maternity care in the UK, as in much of the Western Hemisphere, is dominated by obstetricians, who have moved from a position where they were called in to assist with a problem labour to the current situation where they control the majority of pregnancies and births. They have done so by persuading the population that childbirth is inherently dangerous, that women's bodies do not function well, by undermining their confidence, by claiming that only obstetric care will guarantee a healthy baby and, worst of all, by carrying out what is now an international witch hunt to remove those midwives who practise real midwifery. As a result of this control, women's voices are often ignored."

Childbirth was not a medical issue before the 1960's. Every pregnant woman was designated a midwife, who befriended, got to know her, and together they worked to deliver the child. This was the norm. It ensured that the mother had someone to speak to, someone who listened to her, someone who knew when to call for medical assistance, if required.

The NHS has, to a significant degree, abandoned this one-to-one relationship between mother and midwife. Is this at the root of the problem? A shortage of midwives? Could this be something to do with the undermining and abandonment of their former role and function?

Now, pregnant women almost exclusively give birth in hospital. AIMS believes that every woman should be able to choose to give birth at home. Even as recently as 2007 the Department of Health said (in Maternity Matters) that "the choice of home birth should be offered to all women". This is not what happens now. The NHS believes that all women need to have access to the latest medical technology, at all times; that unless the natural process of giving birth is supported by doctors, it is dangerous. AIMS has described the process.

        "It was not until the 1970s that (AIMS) realised that, rather than providing quality care for truly high-risk women, the obstetricians had seized the opportunity to gain control of all births. Instead of women being cared for in the community by a skilled midwife, and referred to an obstetrician when the midwife detected a problem, all women were now required to book with a GP who invariably simply referred her to an obstetrician. The community midwives were brought into a centralised hospital service and converted into obstetric nurses. Unfortunately, in the UK the system does not differentiate between an obstetric nurse and a midwife; they are all called midwives."

For instance, ultrasound has to be available, despite evidence that it could be harmful - evidence that has never been properly research, or even acknowledged. And the option of Caesarian birth has to be available, even with concerns that far too many births are using this surgical procedure when it is entirely unnecessary.

I will not even bother to mention he role of pharmaceutical drugs in pregnancy, and their impact on both the mother and the baby. It is a subject in itself, but they are a a known cause of birth defects.

So women no longer had a midwife to take her through the final weeks of pregnancy, someone to talk to, to seek reassurance from, to discuss any social, emotional or medical issues and problems with their pregnancy. Now, she has a bureaucracy of medical experts, who know so much that they do not need to listen to the mother. They know so much, and are so correct, they feel able to 'bully' women, apparently. Yet this is how conventional medicine works, everywhere, in all spheres of medical practise. It is an arrogant medical system. It knows best. 

This arrogance has deeper roots than maternity services. Conventional medicine is in a constant state of denial. The pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines they use cause serious adverse reactions - which are never admitted, until such time they can no longer be denied. To admit the failure , and the inherent dangers of these 'medicines' would be to invite claims for medical negligence - which is already playing a leading role in bankrupting the NHS.

The assumption within the NHS is that they know best, and the best medicine has to have access to the most up-to-date medical drugs and technology. Pregnancy is not a 'normal' process. Women are in mortal danger unless they conform to a medical process over which obstetricians are in control.

Perhaps we all need to ask serious questions of the NHS. And the right question always includes:

"Is the conventional medicine provided by the NHS safe?"

MEDICAL MISTAKES & ERRORS. What is happening at the NHS Trust in Shrewsbury and Telford is old news. It has been happening for decades

• The piece that follows was written in 2008, and published in my E-Book, 'The Failure of Conventional Medicine'.
• Since that time there has been regular reports of 'medical mistakes' and 'medical errors' within the NHS, and around the world.
• These mistakes and errors cause serious illness and disease and death.

The most recent health scandal concerns what has been happening at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust, where there is now an ongoing investigation into more than 600 cases of newborn children and mothers dying, or left injured.

Further, we are being told that this may be just the tip of the iceberg, and that the scandal has been going on for decades, and that the failure "might be more widespread in the NHS".

Yet are these really just mistakes and errors?

Or the consequence of operating a medical system 

that is INHERENTLY dangerous?

A failed system of medicine

So this is what I wrote 11 years ago, about the same kind of 'mistakes' and 'errors' that are currently hitting the headlines .....

     "It has been estimated that between 5-10% of patients admitted to hospital are infected with hospital-acquired diseases, such as MRSA (360 deaths in 2005 in England alone) and Clostridium Difficile (1,300 death in 2004). The problem, according to the NHS is that health professionals needed to do more to address hygiene to improve patient safety - thereby ignoring the troublesome fact that whilst these infections can be spread by bad hygiene their actual cause is the overuse of antibiotics - conventional medicine's most miraculous miracle drug!

It is the same throughout the world. On 25 October 2006 the BBC reported that in Italy it has been estimated that as many as 90 people die in hospital every day “due to medical malpractice and organisational errors”. Note that the deaths are not caused by ‘medicine’ - but by malpractice, and error. The calculation of 33,000 annual deaths is more than the number of people killed on the roads in Italy, which means that there are an awful lot of ‘errors’ and ‘malpractice’ going on!

Celia Hall, Medical Editor, Daily Telegraph.
"One NHS patient in 10 'is harmed in hospital'"
6 July 2006. This article said that nearly a million patient safety incidents or 'near misses' in a single year were recorded in NHS trusts, drawing attention to the effectiveness of the Patient Safety Agency. It estimated that in 2004-05 there were 974,000 patient safety incidents in England and Wales and MPs believe that 22% of mistakes go unreported.

In the same Daily Telegraph article the charity, Peter Walsh, the chief executive of 'Action against Medical Accidents' (AvMA) called for stronger sanctions.

               "We hope the report will give an injection of urgency into work to improve patient safety. Whilst there has been welcome progress we want to see more teeth given to existing guidelines and safety alerts. It should be compulsory for NHS providers to implement them".
Sarah Bosely
Guardian
11 August 2006This outlined 40,000 NHS drug errors logged in a year, the figures having been collated by the National Patient Safety Agency. The article said that the statistics inevitably underestimated the problem 'since not all errors are reported'.

Jerome Burne
Daily Mail
12 September 2006
              "In the UK, 10,000 people are killed every year by adverse drug reactions which happens when the prescription drug supposed to be curing you kills or harms you instead. That is more than the number who die from cervical cancer, taking illegal drugs, cancer of the mouth and passive smoking combined. It's actually more dangerous to visit your doctor than it is to drive your car - in 2004, traffic accidents were responsible for some 3,221 deaths. Yet a further 40,000 people each year are made sick enough by drugs they are taking to be admitted to hospital".
 

WDDTY e-news
Doctor Error: It’s rife, especially among the newborns
7 February 2008 

"It's an urban myth - and one that happens to be true - that the death rate plummets when doctors go on strike. Patients in hospital are especially vulnerable to the doctor's ministrations, and it's even worse for the newborn baby who hasn't yet made it home. A new study into newborns that needed 'hospital' care - usually because of low birth rate or premature birth - has revealed the extent of doctor error or doctor-induced (iatrogenic) problems. Researchers monitored the progress of 388 babies who had been admitted to a neo-natal unit in Southern France from January to September 2005; in that time, researchers witness 267 doctor errors, and nearly 30% of these were serious. Two babies died as a direct result of the errors".
(Source: The Lancet, 2008; 371: 404-10).

WDDTY reported on research (published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 2006; 166: 1410-6) that studied the progress of 7,054 patients admitted to a veterans' hospital between 2003 and 2004. Of these, 792 patients suffered a heart attack while in the hospital (about 11%) and that they were twice as likely to die from the attack.

As the article says, this means that up to 2,690,000 people could be harmed by medical ‘mishaps’ every year. This represents around 4.5% of the entire population. It goes on to say that in the USA, where twice as much is spent on pharmaceutical drugs, the problem could be affecting up to 13,450,000 people every year. Government officials were said to be 'shocked' to hear that nobody knows how many of the reported 'blunders' ended in death. Apparently, only 1 in 4 hospitals 'own up' to the patient when something goes wrong; the rest presumably blame the patient illness on admission. Just 1 in 25 drug reactions is ever reported.

Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts committee said that 1 in 10 people admitted to a hospital in Britain every year will suffer a mishap or accident that will harm him, and that this is based on known, reported accidents. Apparently, the committee members discovered that the situation is not getting better, that doctors and hospital staff are not learning from mistakes, but repeating them every year, that guidelines are being consistently ignored, and safety recommendations are not being implemented.

 SO HOW LONG MUST WE CONTINUE TO ENDURE THESE STORIES?

WHEN WILL WE RECOGNISE WHAT SHOULD BE NOW OBVIOUS?

CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE IS INHERENTLY UNSAFE

IF WE WANT SAFE MEDICINE....

.... WE HAVE TO RETURN TO NATURAL MEDICINE