Woman's Hour - Parenting: The role of fathers on maternity wards

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

In January, midwives at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary complained that expectant dads were treating maternity wards ‘like a hotel’. Issues ranged from dads sharing beds with new mums, ordering takeaway food and making other new mothers embarrassed about breastfeeding. But as NHS policy states that maternity services should be ‘mother-focussed and family-centred’, should more be being done to welcome fathers onto wards? Jenni speaks to Dr Jeremy Davies from the Fatherhood Institute, NHS midwife Leah Hazard, and Cathy Nolan, who gave birth to her son last May.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray here, welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for parents. If you were watching Call the Midwife recently, you'll have seen how doubtful some midwives were about having fathers around during and immediately after birth. It was set in the mid-60s. Well, now it's almost expected that a father will be present and involved in the care of his new baby. But last month, midwives at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh complained about their constant presence on the ward.

They claimed the fathers were treating the hospital as an hotel, sharing beds with their partners, ordering takeaway foods and making other new mothers embarrassed about breastfeeding. Well, the NHS says maternity services should be mother focused and family friendly. So what should be done to welcome fathers onto the wards? I'm joined by Cathy Nolan, who had her son in Edinburgh, Leah Hazard, who's an NHS midwife in Glasgow, and Dr Jeremy Davies, who's Head of Communications at the Fatherhood Institute. Jeremy, what's it like being a father on a maternity ward? Good morning. Well, I think it very much depends which maternity ward you're on. So some fathers seem to have a warm welcome and the staff seem to understand that they're important, not just in their own right, but because they're a useful support person for their partner.

But we also, we did a survey two years ago with the Nuffield Foundation, and we found that a lot of fathers were reporting that they were being ignored, and sometimes, actually, they felt quite marginalized by the experience so it was quite common for example for them to not be addressed by name certainly not to be encouraged to ask questions and two-thirds of the fathers who did our survey, and it was about 2000 dads who answered it, about two thirds of them at no point were any of the staff talking to them about their role as a father. What do you make of the complaints from Edinburgh that they tend to make themselves a little bit too much at home well to be honest i think this what what this sounds like to me is that a policy has probably been implemented without being clearly communicated either to the staff or to the dads themselves the the tone of um some of the comments I've seen from the midwife who was quoted seemed very much to be talking about the men as if they were an unwanted encumbrance. view i think also from a clinical point of view that's not a great attitude because you know these

men and these men uh are important to the partners so even if you're only thinking about it clinically i would say you should be thinking about these men uh you know as a potential uh emotional and practical support to the women. So, yes, there may be rules that you want to surround their presence with. And if those rules are communicated clearly to the men, I'm quite sure they would follow them, the vast majority. Leah, as a midwife, what's it like for staff when fathers make themselves, as is alleged in Edinburgh, a little bit too much at home? Are they an unwanted encumbrance? Well, I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to say that fathers are unwelcome on the postnatal ward.

As your previous guest was saying, it's really important to respect and honour the role that fathers can play, any partner can play in the early life of a family. So there's no excuse really for a sort of poor or unwelcoming or hostile attitude. But I think what we need to point out is that just logistically speaking, most large NHS hospitals are not set up to accommodate partners long term or overnight. We're usually talking about something like a four-bedded bay divided by curtains and in each bed space there's just enough room for a bed, a cot, a chair and maybe one person at the bedside. So simply from a logistical point of view it's quite difficult. What I should point out as well is although we certainly want to welcome dads and partners at any time,

postnatal women can be very, very vulnerable physically and emotionally. Many of these women are exhausted. They may have limited mobility. They may be bleeding. They may be trying to breastfeed. They may be in sort of various states of undress throughout the day and night. So although you as an individual woman may welcome your partner, you probably won't welcome somebody else's partner walking past your bed space. And I think that's where the trouble lies.

Cathy, I know you gave birth in Edinburgh last May. What was your experience of this? We had a really positive experience. By the time we had given birth and gone up to the ward, it was about one in the morning. And we didn't know if Tom was going to be allowed to stay or not. We asked if he could. And he was advised to go home to get a good night's sleep. But if he wanted to stay, they couldn't stop him. And so we decided he'd stay. And I think we arrived at a very quiet time, and the midwife very kindly went and found one of the few reclining chairs that they had on the ward.

So Tom was, in the end, able to get a pretty decent night's sleep. How helpful was it for you to have him around? So helpful, and I wouldn't have wanted him to go home um he was able to help me have a shower and get dressed get back into bed he was able to change our son um and these are all things that a midwife could have done but it was it felt important that it was my husband that was able to help me do those things what would you say it was like for the other women around you you know we've we've heard from Leah that women can be very vulnerable at this time and there are a lot of women on the ward. Yeah so vulnerable and all the other women had their partners with them

one of the others stayed I think overnight um and it felt very peaceful on the ward everyone felt like they were in exactly the same boat everyone was considerate of each other's space and um noise levels and um no one it yeah everyone felt we just all felt like we were in the same boat and it didn't feel awkward at all. But I think we got lucky, possibly. What sort of trouble did Tom get into? Well, he'd helped me have a shower and we'd left our son out at the midwife station. And he went out to get him and didn't have any socks on.

So he was in bare feet and got a slight telling off for being barefooted and promptly put a pair of socks on. But that was about as bad as it got for us. Leo, why would a man's bare feet be unacceptable on a maternity ward? That's a really good question. I couldn't possibly try to speak for the midwife who was there at that time. I mean, we can make all kinds of sort of vague comments about health and safety. And I think, you know, obviously that was the midwife's concern at that time. But really, I think this is just a distraction from the bigger issue, which is the health and safety of the other women on the ward.

So I think it's really fantastic that your other guest had a positive, that Cathy had a positive experience. Sorry, Cathy. But what we do need to remember is that, you know, this is a ward for women to prioritise their safety, their privacy. And the women and partners who are on a maternity ward are really just a sort of cross-section of general society. So yes, although the vast majority of couples will be lovely, like Cathy and her partner, there will also be some who maybe are not so lovely. You know, in our hospital we have mostly lovely people, but also some who are involved with the criminal justice system, some who are involved with human trafficking, some who you probably wouldn't want on the ward with you at night.

So my job as a midwife is to make sure that everybody is safe and respected. Jeremy, how do you deal with that question? I mean, obviously fathers have an important role to play in their children's early lives. But might they be a little more considerate that birth and early care is really about mothers and babies and they should know when to back off well i think to be honest that the the evidence we get is that the fathers are uh perfectly happy to back off so that so the tone of the responses we got in our survey was very much, you know, I understand that I am not the big deal here. It's all about her. And the other women on the ward. That's the other point that's been coming over strongly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I go back to the point, I understand that there are logistical issues sometimes where you can't suddenly convert every maternity ward into a place where you know

everybody has a private room and and so on so but i think what we're talking about here is is you know being reasonable having rules clearly communicating the rules. And if people break the rules, then fine, you deal with that. But I don't think we should be designing a system around the fact that whatever tiny, tiny percentage of fathers are involved in human trafficking, I don't think that should be how we design a modern NHS you know that as the NHS's own guidelines have said for many many years ought to be mother-centered but you know thinking about the family. Family friendly. I know it's quite some time since you went through this experience. What was your experience of it? How were you treated?

I had a very good experience, actually. And in fact, it's the only, in the whole time, my son is 20 years old. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that in the whole of his life, the only time a sort of publicly funded person really, I would say, engaged with me one-to-one as a human being was in the maternity unit. And it was a midwife who took me to one side and showed me very patiently how to hold him and bathe him. And it was only five minutes of her time, but I really think it changed my life, because it set me off as a hands-on dad.

Well, Dr Jeremy Davis, Leah Hazard and Cathy Nolan, thank you all very much for being with us. I should just mention that Professor Alex McMahon, the Nurse Director at NHS Lothian, said, in common with all boards, NHS Lothian is implementing the guidance contained in the five-year action plan for maternity and neonatal care issued by NHS Scotland called Best Start. It says that fathers, partners and other family members

should be actively encouraged and supported and we would like to hear from you. Martin in Cromer said men should stay out of the way except for a visit every day. It's a hospital. The staff are busy taking care of people who need it. Their role as a parent starts when the baby goes home. Hospitals are not there to be pandering to weird and recently adopted ideas about being a parent, where the man believes he's actually important in this zone. Just wait a couple of days or even weeks. They're just ego-tripping.

Totally mother-centric is how it should be. Your contributor could have learned how to hold a baby from prenatal lessons. Justin Braithwaite said both my children were born at home in the 1970s. This was not only possible but encouraged. I was there and involved throughout. This was such a valuable and bonding experience. Maternity wards really should be designed to accommodate this. How can it possibly be argued otherwise?

Penny Watt said, I've been a midwife for 30 years and specialised in domestic violence within that role. For women in an abusive relationship at this time of their lives, it is not a rare problem. The maternity ward may be the only place of safety for them following giving birth. Providing visiting hours for fathers is restricted. At the hospital where I worked, the midwives had significant problems with some fathers walking around in their underwear at night, lying on the floor from where they could see under the curtain screen at the women in the adjacent bed, asking for refreshments and using the women's facilities. But more important than all of this,

women in abusive relationships had no opportunity to get away from their abusive partners and disclose their circumstances if they chose to do so. And then someone who didn't want to be named said your piece made me reflect on what happened with hindsight and no, I wasn't welcomed or addressed at all. I never thought to question this. There was no provision for me to sleep, so I slept on my coat on the floor. No human is unnatural at any skill. Childcare is a skill. We teach little girls it from an early age. We don't teach boys. We should. We'd live in a better society if we welcomed men and let them in to being caring. Men can care and if they're taught how to care maybe they won't engage in people trafficking. And that's all for today's podcast for parents. Do remember we rely on you often

for information and suggestions of things you'd like us to discuss. Do let us know. Drop us a tweet or an email. Bye bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.