It was a midwife, nine months after the birth of my son, who lifted a weight off my shoulders that I wasn't even aware I'd been carrying. She had come to my house to do a birth debrief with me, and was going through my notes to find out why it all went as it did. I had spent the previous nine months feeling like a failure, and believing that it must have been my fault. I remember sitting in the hospital for hours after my son's birth, looking at the dark forcep marks on his face, holding him and crying and apologising to him. As she examined my notes, the midwife pointed to a few excerpts and told me “it wasn't your fault, you did everything you could”. Those words unburdened me. They gave me a sense of peace that nothing else really had. I remember feeling my shoulders lighten and feeling like I could breathe again. That hour with her, and the hours I spent with a lovely midwife and her student during the birth of my second child, changed the trajectory of my life and nudged me in the direction of studying midwifery myself.
Pregnancy and birth is the everyday for the midwife. We come to work every day to care for women and their families, but I wonder if, because this experience is completely normal for us, we forget that this is not the case for the women. As a PC, I used to forget this very concept all the time. We were told that we dealt with 5% of the population 95% of the time, and for the most part that was true. Most of the people I dealt with on a regular basis were well-known to the police. They knew how the system worked, what their rights were, and which solicitor they wanted. I enjoyed it, and I got to know a lot of the regulars. It's a bizarre thing to arrest somebody and be asking about their family while you're taking them back to the station. Then I would have experiences like the following: I would knock at someone's door as I made house-to-house enquiries, about a stolen bike or some such, and would have to offer a lot of reassurance to someone who had answered the door thinking that one of their relatives had died.
‘We don't have to change the world, all we have to do is change one woman's experience. All that takes is one person who listens and tries their best’
“No, don't worry, everything's OK, I'm just doing some enquiries about a break-in down the road,” I would say, praying that my visit wouldn't cause a stress-induced heart attack. I wasn't used to people to people reacting that way to me and I found it jarring. It would take me a few moments to think, “well, actually, why else would you think the police were at your door, if not for something horrid and tragic?”
Many women accessing hospital care when having their baby are healthy and have little experience of how the NHS works. Their expectations are shaped by the media and popular culture, in which your child actually co-operates with you and everything looks easy. They look to us as professionals to guide them on their journey to parenthood. Often these experiences turn out to be different to what they had imagined, and their birth not the one they had planned. My trust recently held a ‘Whose Shoes?’ event for student midwives, and during this event I heard some very powerful birth stories. They highlighted the difference it can make to someone's practise, be they midwife or obstetrician, to just stop and listen to a woman.
The ‘Better Births’ report in 2016 focused on changing maternity care, and the call for more personalised care pathways. It highlighted the need for women and their families to be at the heart of decision-making, developing personalised care plans in conjunction with their midwives and the wider allied health professions. This call can often seem insurmountable, given the issues that maternity care is currently facing. Low staffing levels, overworked practitioners, the looming midwifery retirement crisis, and the increasingly complex needs of some women (many of whom believe themselves too difficult for us to care for) are all major concerns. Some people have real fear that the system is broken. But at the heart of all of this are women and their families. We don't have to change the world, all we have to do is change one woman's experience, and all that takes is one person who listens and tries their best.
Things don't always go to plan: emergencies happen and circumstances change. This happened to me, but what I took away from my experience was the knowledge that someone was on my side and that they worked hard for me. I see this support in the midwives and obstetricians that I work with. I have seen hundreds of instances of care where they have made a difference. It's their example I follow as I become a midwife myself, and what I hope to be for the women I care for.