"I would not recommend this hospital to anyone"

Thank you for sharing your experiences with us. Even though your story is not positive, I recognise that we need to hear about everybody’s experiences to improve the service we provide. I appreciate how worrying a delay in care can be, and I am sorry that capacity issues increased your anxiety during a time that was most likely already filled with apprehension.

As this story is anonymous, and transferred to Care Opinion from NHS choices with a month delay, I was not able to look up the details of your case for more information. Please do contact us directly on 0203 447 8353 if you would like to discuss the specifics of your care in more detail. I do however, want to address the generic nature of your concerns.

Unfortunately, work flows within maternity units are challenging to precisely predict, and there are occasions when demand is greater than routine capacity allows. We have several processes in place to ensure the safety of all of our service users are met, including a prioritising system. This system means that those with the greatest clinical needs are given immediate priority; it also means that decisions on when to increase certain workloads in specific clinical areas, such as starting an augmentation of labour (the medical process that is followed to commence labour when waters break and contractions do not start) are taken, with the safety of all of our women and babies in mind. While ideally augmentation of labour would be commenced approximately 24 hours after someone’s waters have broken, we do feel it is appropriate to delay this if the woman and baby’s condition remains clinically stable and/or the augmentation would result in increasing the risk of harm to that mother and baby, or other mothers and babies on the unit. The staff caring for you would continually assess and reassess this risk by monitoring the wellbeing of mother and baby. Any changes in the clinical situation would influence a change in the prioritisation; the fact that your wife's case was not escalated during this period, implies that the situation for yourselves remained safe. While we acknowledge your point that we could have ‘got a smooth and easy pregnancy out of the way’, we would never compromise your experience or safety for expediency. I am sorry however for the delay your wife experienced and that staff appear not to have explained why this was so and ensured that you were comfortable.

We have instigated a number of processes within our unit to increase our capacity; more collaborative projects with our neighbouring hospitals and redeploying elements of our elective procedures to their sites. We are monitoring this activity closely, and they seem to be having a positive effect. Nonetheless, I completely acknowledge that we did not explain our processes effectively to you, nor did we meet your expectations. I therefore repeat our invitation to contact us directly to discuss your case in more detail. I hope that you are both settling into parenthood and and enjoying your baby.