"Deserved better"

We recently were admitted to King Edwards Memorial Hospital for the birth of our child. During our stay at the hospital supposedly being cared for by the staff, at no point did we feel listened to or respected.

Firstly the stretch and sweeps, of which there were many, were not consented to! They were all performed under the guise of an internal which is a different procedure, it takes a split second during an internal to ask for consent to do a stretch and sweep. Legally your staff are required to get consent before doing so, which they did not! I believe this is abuse, I feel violated and disrespected.

Secondly, during the labour and birth, I made repeated requests for my wishes on my birth plan to be honoured and none of my wants and needs were respected. I recall your staff behaved unprofessionally, arrogantly and treated myself and my spouse like a statistic with little regard to our basic human rights. I felt they created an air of total panic and mayhem during my labour and repeatedly scare mongered and bullied us into making decisions we were not comfortable with. I felt terrified and violated the entire way through instead of supported and cared for. We are aware that birth is not straightforward and sometimes complications can make things difficult however, if dealt with professionally, respectfully and calmly, I believe it didn’t have to be such a horrifyingly traumatic experience for us. We are now left traumatised by the labour, birth and the following our stay on the ward in your hospital.

Based on my experience, the lack of communication between your staff was and is appalling and left us feeling unimportant and uninformed. Your staff made some decisions without any discussion with us. At several points we were not informed of what was happening with myself and our baby. This left us feeling confused, scared and unable to trust your staff.

Thirdly, your seemingly outdated and archaic visitor policy is a total joke in my opinion! As I understand it, most hospitals around the globe now allow partners and spouses to stay overnight with the birth person and newborn child after the birth for support. I feel it is completely unacceptable that a person who has just had a massively traumatic birth be left overnight with substantial post birth injuries, cannular-ised and catheter-ised to recover and care for a newborn baby alone. Especially when it seems you are so short staffed that when the patient presses the assistance button no one comes. Not to mention how I believe the visitor policy discriminates against the partner and spouse and does not allow them to be with their child overnight which is fundamental for bonding. My spouse has missed out on a substantial amount of important quality bonding time with their baby.

I recall covid was used as an excuse for this visitor policy but we heard from other people that this policy has been around pre-covid!

Fourthly, your hospital claims to be LGBTQI+ friendly and even goes as far as to fly the rainbow flag outside and yet we felt we were discriminated against the entire time!

The level of gender and orientation discrimination I felt was shocking and unacceptable, not to mention illegal!

I feel you should remove the flag or properly train your staff and ensure they behave correctly.

We want to be contacted so that at the very least, the written discrimination on our records can be rectified. We feel we deserve a formal apology and change needs to be made now so that this does not continue to happen to other people. Unfortunately we have heard from dozens of other people who have had horrific experiences while birthing at KEMH. We and the local community feel we deserve better from you.