Push, a new sitcom from the BBC, promises to be “a laugh out loud celebration of the chaotic, high-stakes reality” of NHS midwifery. “The NHS is a marvel to me,” says the creator Jessica Knapett, “A reminder that in our apparently broken world, amid the chaos there are good people slogging away to make miracles happen”.
As one poster points out on X, there’s something of the Soviet Union to the state broadcaster tweely celebrating maternity services in the UK. Britain has an unusually high neonatal mortality rate in a European context — higher than that of Greece and Portugal as well as Finland and Sweden.
Granted, neonatal mortality is affected by maternal health. There is only so much that doctors and midwives can do. But a lot of mothers and babies have been failed. Consider the case of Ida Lock, who was born at Royal Lancaster Infirmary in 2019 and died a week later of a brain injury as a result of a lack of oxygen. An inquest found that there had been “eight missed opportunities” to save little Ida, with the coroner condemning “an ineffective, dysfunctional and callous system”. One midwife even suggested to Ida’s mother that the baby’s poor health was a result of cigarette smoking. The mother was not a smoker.
There will always be mistakes, of course. No system is perfect. But for insight into the scale of failures in the NHS, we can turn to, well, the BBC. “In March 2022,” the Beeb reported this year:
… an investigation into services at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust found that more than 200 mothers and babies could have survived with better care. Then, in October that year, a review into maternity services at East Kent Hospitals University NHS trust found that at least 45 babies might have survived if they had been given proper treatment.
And an ongoing review into the maternity care provided by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS trust, due to be completed next year, is set to be the biggest yet, with around 2,500 cases being examined.
The NHS now faces a potential £27bn bill for maternity failings. Dr Bill Kirkup, who led a damning investigation into maternity and neonatal services in Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, says that Britain urgently needs a “national plan to improve maternity care”.
None of this, to be clear, is to deny that there are thousands of fantastic doctors and midwives working in the NHS. Nor is it to deny that there are doctors and midwives who accomplish more in a day than I am likely to accomplish in a lifetime of opinion commentating. But we can applaud the essential work they do without excusing the system — or, indeed, without excusing some of their colleagues.
The jolly idea that the NHS is equivalent to the best team in the world being cursed with inadequate gear is too rosy
We hear less these days about how the NHS is the “envy of the world”. (This was always a stupid claim — hardly any non-British people could tell you what it is.) Now, its failures tend to be attributed to underinvestment — and a kind of “lions led by donkeys” attitude has set in. “The ward may be scruffy and perpetually underfunded,” says the BBC’s promotional materials for Push, “But this lot are (mostly) grafters and fiercely protective of the place they call home.” I’m not going to claim that there is nothing to this. I’m sure the NHS could use more funding in some areas. The UK spends less on healthcare than France or Germany.
But the jolly idea that the NHS is equivalent to the best team in the world being cursed with inadequate gear is too rosy. Take Blackpool Victoria Hospital. Six staff members, according to Lancs Live, have been jailed since 2018, with their work-related crimes ranging from neglect to molestation. This figure does not include whoever sexually assaulted grandmother Valerie Kneale while she was staying in the stroke unit. Ms Kneale died as a result of her injuries, but the unlawful killing was only exposed because the police were investigating mistreatment and neglect in the unit for unrelated reasons. The killer has not been found.
Still, a cultish attitude towards the NHS endures. How else can one describe a culture in which schoolchildren are encouraged to say “thank you” to the national healthcare system? Again, countless doctors and nurses do deserve thanks. But Britain has a curious system in which the successes of doctors and nurses are considered to be attributable to the institution as a whole but this never seems to apply to the failures. (My mother had her ultimately fatal cancer recurrence dismissed as a stomach problem for months, but I think it would be crass to say that she was “killed by the NHS”).
I say all of this as a supporter of healthcare being free at the point of use. But Britons are never going to be safer when they get sick, or when they give birth, if people do not shake their conviction that if they fail to idealise the NHS, American-style health insurers will swoop down — Marvel villain style — to bankrupt your grandma
