As to whether you think it is a good or bad thing that people get moved from hospital to hospital for their treatment. Of course if those people are either pregnant women or new born babies. Maternity services are currently being reviewed. People are pretty confused, because before Lord Darzi stepped up they were proclaiming the merger of smaller units and the formation of larger ones and now Lord Darzi is also talking of smaller, particularly low risk, midwife led units. Meanwhile everything is pretty much in a state of flux, I know this because the commissioning of maternity services falls in my remit.

The recent press stories about lack of beds / staff to safely care for mums and babies could be thought of a really bad, since it shows that units are up to capacity and not able to cope. It shows that perhaps there are insufficient midwives, obstetricians and neonatal nurses and doctors. Well yes it is true that units find it difficult to attract well qualified staff and even harder to retain them. After all while the actual work is fulfilling I’d imagine, there are plenty of reasons why people might not want to continue working in such high stress environments. There are simple things like the politics with a capital P of policy and the politics with a small p of what goes on internally, there are also the stresses of the litigious environment, the apparently thankless task of trying to care for women and babies against the backdrop of increasing expectation. In other words you are often onto a no win. Perhaps the fact that a woman who pitches up to have her baby induced and is sent to the hospital 20 miles away is a really bad thing. Perhaps the fact that 32 week triplets cannot be cared for in the same unit is a bad thing (well certainly for the parents that is not good at all).

On the other hand you could  look at it like this. The units are recognising their limitations. They are recognising when they are full and when they have insufficient staff to do more. While the mother might be annoyed that she couldn’t have the midwife she thought she would get to deliver her baby, actually she has been kept safe and what is more her baby has been kept safe. Also if one triplet has been moved it is because it was safest to move that baby rather than a singleton baby who is more ill. These decisions, while not right in the widest context, are actually made on the basis of clinical safety for those mothers and babies as well as all of the mothers and babies in that unit today. For that we should be grateful.