According to a new poll, a quarter of mums were left alone during their labour when they were feeling anxious.
The Care Quality Commission poll surveyed 23,000 women who had a live birth in hospital, birth centre, maternity unit or home and found that almost one in five women felt their concerns during labour were not taken seriously.
CQC’s chief inspector of hospitals, Sir Mike Richards, says that: “Women and their partners are being left alone when it worries them, toilets and wards are described as unclean, and some women are not given the pain relief they had expected or planned to use in their birth plan.”
Of those surveyed, just over half felt that the toilets were clean and others felt that the hospital wards were not clean enough.
Sir Richards says:“Feedback in the comments shows at times a truly shocking picture of experiences that should be the most joyous time in a woman’s life, not the most frightening.”
One of the mothers surveyed found the night staff in her maternity hospital rude. “I had an emergency C-section and asked a night staff (midwife) to bring me the formula milk, and her answer was ‘go and take it yourself. My baby was crying and she didn’t help me.”
However, the results also show that most have confidence in their midwives with more than half saying they were treated with kindness.
