IT is another disturbing story. Earlier this week, The Herald revealed the case of a woman who was sent away from a Glasgow hospital after a miscarriage and told she would have to wait five weeks for surgery. Now another woman has spoken about the wait she had to endure after her miscarriage and the cold and clinical way she felt she was treated. In the words of the head of the stillbirth and neonatal death charity Sands, there was a time when Glasgow was a flagship for maternity services. So what on earth has gone wrong?
In responding to the case of the Glasgow woman, the Health Minister Shona Robison insisted it was an isolated incident and it is certainly true that many women do experience good care after a miscarriage. However, everyone agrees on the principle that should guide care in this area. Suffering a miscarriage at any stage of a pregnancy is profoundly traumatic and women who go through it should be cared for sensitively and as quickly as possible.
The consequences of failing to meet this standard are clear in the case of Alexis Atkinson, from Stirling, who has described how she spent two weeks at home knowing she was carrying a dead foetus. She was then told she would have to wait a further two weeks before she could undergo a dilation and curettage procedure – so, in all, a projected four-week wait at a highly upsetting time. She then required emergency treatment when she began bleeding, which Mrs Atkinson described as cold and clinical.
Mrs Atkinson herself has described why her treatment was so damaging – often, women who suffer miscarriage feel like it is treated as a medical incident rather than what it really is: the loss of a child. Mrs Atkinson says it took her five months to recover and return to work because she was grieving, and yet she was told she would have to carry on for a month and then, when she did end up in hospital, she apparently received care that was lacking empathy or consideration.
The chief medical officer for Scotland Catherine Calderwood is now looking into the situation for the health minister, and has already confirmed that the current standard is that women requiring a surgical procedure should be offered it within two weeks. But even that is too long: a procedure like dilation and curettage should be carried out within hours if possible rather than days. The standard of care that women receive across the country is also much patchier than it should be – in some places, it is exceptional, in others, way below standard. Dr Calderwood’s report must tackle this issue as well as how long surgical procedures are taking.
For the health minister herself, there is no avoiding the fact that delays are being caused by staff shortages. Mrs Robison says a delay of five weeks for surgery is unacceptable, but it is also unacceptable that Scotland’s health service is still under-funded, under-resourced and is chronically short of nurses, midwives, GPs and consultants. That is the painful reality – it is women like Mrs Atkinson who are suffering the consequences.
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