Patient Opinion's team blog

This is our NHS...let's make it better!

Next week I'm off to talk to commissioners of maternity services about online feedback from users of the services they commission.

Maternity care is one of those parts of health care where "clinical outcomes" are vital but usually OK, and "experiential outcomes" sometimes forgotten. I've blogged before on what women have said on Patient Opinion about their care.

So I thought it might be interesting to construct a quick Wordle of the 1,000 odd comments on maternity care that we can find on both Patient Opinion and NHS Choices. And here it is.

words used in stories about maternity

Maternity care isn't delivering

Yesterday the London Evening Standard ran a story on the "nightmare" of maternity care in London, prompted by stories women have shared on Patient Opinion about their bad experiences of giving birth.

For example, Maree calls her experience of childbirth "terrifying, confusing and demeaning". Anonymous 2 found "the showers were flithy and paint was peeling off the wall" where she gave birth. Anon reported "cockroaches in the communal eating area". And today on Patient Opinion, Sam told how she feels that her experience has left her not with post-natal depression, but with post traumatic stress disorder.

To be sure, we hear plenty of stories of extraordinary care too. Often, these too will move us to tears.

But that's not the point. The point is that plenty of women are saying, very clearly and courageously, that their experience simply wasn't good enough - and, in some cases, was actually harmful.

The point is: 15 years after the Changing Childbirth report, surely we can do better than this?