Campaigners claim Shropshire maternity units downgrade on way despite pledges

Their fears come in spite of assurances from health bosses that the move is only a temporary response to staffing issues, to ensure staff can get out to each area to meet women's choices of where they want to give birth.

Midwife-led units at Bridgnorth, Ludlow and Oswestry have been dogged by temporary closures over the past six months, with a dozen such closure just in the last month across the three areas.

Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Trust (SaTH), which runs the centres, says that by making all the midwife units on-call, such closures could be avoided as staff would not be tied up manning empty units elsewhere and would be free to go where needed.

But Gill George, speaking for campaign group Shropshire Defend Our NHS, said it was not good enough and was a worrying sign of things to come.

She said: "Back in December 2016 they tried to drive through the scrapping of inpatient postnatal care and the imposition of on-call staffing of the rural maternity units.

"This would leave women in labour phoning up an on-call midwife, living perhaps 30 miles or more away, and asking her to pop along and open the maternity unit.

"It means women giving birth on the doorstep of the maternity unit, waiting for it to open. It means an obvious and potentially catastrophic risk to mothers and babies. It means women will effectively be forced to give birth at Telford instead, denying women choice and imposing another set of risks through unnecessary travel and the ‘medicalisation’ of low risk births."

She said at the time that plan had been scrapped after mass protest from mothers and maternity supporters, including a march through the streets of Ludlow to the hospital there.

But now it was being proposed again, which she said showed SaTH was determined to downgrade the units.

But Sarah Jamieson, head of midwifery at SaTH, said the the on-call idea was to put a stop to the temporary closures, which health bosses knew had unfortunately been "disruptive" for both mums-to-be and staff.

"We are exploring the viability of adapting our current model of care to provide an on-call model to staff on demand rather than staffing buildings where there may be no activity.

“It is our opinion, and one supported by many, that this option would be preferable to suspending services; however, this is currently our only option in order to ensure safety.

“It is important to stress that no final decision has been taken on this proposal, which would be an interim response to the on-going issues we are facing in terms of demand and staff availability," she said.