I am angry that in 2024, women are still being failed.
I am angry that a baby has lost her life because a stretched NHS wasn’t able to make sure a brand-new mum who has had a long labour and no sleep was sent home just 4 hours after her baby was born with no support.
Some may say the dad would step up, but the dad had most likely not slept either while his partner was going through a long labour.
I am angry that new parents are allowed to drive home with a new baby in the car when they are most likely sleep deprived to the equivalent of being drunk.
To put this into context, 24 hours awake is the equivalent of having reached the legal drink drive limit, and these parents are awake for more than 24 hours, driving home with a brand-new baby in the car.
Forget driving, but just think, would you leave a brand-new baby in the care of a drunk person who has never looked after a baby before?
No, you wouldn’t, so why are we sending mums home after major surgery, after traumatic births, after 3-day labours without making sure they are safe to look after their baby and have a support network in place?
40 years ago, mums stayed in hospital for 10 days after their first baby, they were taught how to look after their baby, feed, their baby, bath their baby, and were looked after and given time to sleep and heal.
It isn’t like we have progressed enough that we have put into place a great antenatal service or post-natal care system, we have a shocking support system which is getting worse.
Covid saw the end of many NHS antenatal classes, and the ones you pay for like the NCT courses aren’t that great. Yes, I know, they may come after me for writing this, but my experience and countless others have been the same, and they have done nothing to improve the care. I even contacted them in 2022 about collaborating on my Passport2Parenthood course to help prepare expectant parents with evidence-based information and arm them with tools to navigate the reality of having a baby, to which they replied they already had something in place, which they don’t.
We are setting new parents up to fail by treating them with kid gloves, so when the shit does hit the fan, which is 1 in 4 emergency c-sections plus countless other traumatic births, they haven’t laid any solid foundations or have a decent network of support around them.
I have been told that by telling expectant parents what might really happen, we are scaring them because pregnant mums are ‘fragile’, yes that is a term someone once used with me, but surely this is leading them into a false sense of security.
My NCT class told me to make sure I have my birthing plan, so I feel empowered to get the birth I want, that breastfeeding is the most natural thing in the world and baby’s just work their way up the body and latch on, and that newborn baby’s sleep all the time.
5 out of 7 mums in my class had an emergency c-section, one had horrific tears and the other induced. Not one of us got anywhere close to the birth plan we created.
Breastfeeding took 5 and a half weeks to get established after I eventually saw an IBCLC and got the latch right, this was after seeing the infant feeding team on the NHS multiple times and being told it was fine. I nearly gave up so many times as the pain was so bad, and my baby cried all the time and was permanently attached to me. I only fought my way through with sheer determination and stubbornness as I had previously been told I wouldn’t be able to breastfeed and wanted to prove people wrong.
Sleep? What’s sleep?
Now we are getting into the nitty gritty of it.
Yes, new baby’s do sleep a lot, when they are on you, or latched to a breast meaning you can’t sleep yourself.
Yes, baby’s do sleep at night, but in short stints that absolutely mess with our own sleep. Adults need a 4-hour block for any kind of restoration, so when you are getting 1-hour chunks of sleep followed by long wake periods, it starts to take its toll, and fast. Babies are meant to sleep this way, it is an in-built survival mechanism and a preventative of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), but for us adults, we aren’t meant to ‘sleep like a baby’ as the saying goes.
By giving expectant parents the real statistics and signposting to where they may need to look for support, meaning they have the details in their phone book before their head falls off when having a baby and they have no idea whether they are coming or going, we are giving them the chance to build a network of support, and for a length of time that is useful.
We know that poor sleep and poor mental health are connected. Without good sleep, our brains aren’t getting the chance to repair and help us regulate our emotions and process memories.
I don’t know about you, but just thinking of a new parent who is having little to no sleep and the rise of post-natal depression, post-natal anxiety, post-natal psychosis and other forms of depression, that there might just be a link.
There is a rise of dads suffering with depression as a result of having a baby, 1 in 10 is the diagnosed figure, but it is likely to be higher than that.
Sleep is the core foundation we need for survival along with food, water and oxygen, so why is it deemed so unimportant?
Since I posted my thoughts around the sad loss of life of Evelyn Grace at Leeds Teaching Hospital, hundreds of women have shared their experience, and it isn’t pretty.
One poster mentioned she had worked in the A&E for 4 years and saw baby’s losing their life regularly to situations similar to Evelyn Grace, who is thought to have suffocated under her mums breast as she fell asleep feeding her new baby when sleep deprived, but not just of the newborn stage. This is becoming too common a theme and change needs to happen.
So, onto my how.
How can we make change, and how can we make it quick?
The NHS isn’t going to repair itself overnight, they are too overstretched, too underfunded and there are too many trusts and red tape involved.
The antenatal classes have proved they aren’t willing to educate on the reality, and far too many people are being failed by these services.
So, who else is close enough to the individual, that needs the individuals to be well, and has a responsibility to look after their person?
Employers.
Employers can start the ball rolling with evidence-based support from finding out someone is to become a parent, and give them access to information to help them be educated, feel empowered and be confident enough to ask questions and challenge professionals where needed.
Employers need their workforce to be safe in their jobs, and when most dads are back at work within 2 weeks of their baby being born, we know that they are not sleeping. We know that things at home are difficult and that their partner may be struggling, and this guilt and weight is coming into work with them. The pre-baby education can help the parents create a support network, what we used to call a village, so that someone is looking after mum at home.
Employers need their mums to return after maternity leave, but they need them to return safe to do their job and to do it well. If the mum is still not sleeping, they are likely to burn out at lightening speed and leave the workforce. If you want to gain an idea of how big this issue is, when asked the question, ‘how old was your baby when they started sleeping well enough for you to function SAFELY in your job’, 40% said between 18 months and 3 years, and 22% said later than 3 years. So that is 62% of parents that are not safe to do their job in the first 18 months as the bare minimum.
It is thought that 20% of accidents in work are fatigue related, and the impact of this can be disastrous. To give you an example, it is thought that the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster was caused by sleep deprived operatives.
This is a serious issue, and one that needs to be taken a lot more seriously than it currently is.
Sleep deprivation is a form of torture for a reason, so we can’t just expect new mums and dads to be able to function safely and effectively in any capacity.
Employers are the people who will benefit from their employees getting better sleep as their mental health will be better, their productivity and performance will be better, and this impacts positively on their bottom line.
Employers are the quickest route to make positive change happen fast, so let’s get the conversation started.
Let’s move sleep up the wellbeing food chain and start making a difference today.
By Nicola Ratcliffe
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