Campaign to save midwifery practice

A campaign has been launched by a midwifery practice providing women-centred care in south London after becoming involved in a row with King’s College Hospital.

The Albany Midwifery Practice in Peckham, has been providing care for women from very disadvantaged backgrounds for more than ten years.

With a caesarean rate far lower than the national average and a successful breastfeeding rate, the practice has had its links with King’s severed after the hospital claims the safety of mothers and babies were being put at risk.

Now Kings is forcing the service to close down its birth service at home and has imposed limits on its continuity of care.

These are both vital to the women living Peckham, ranked as the fourteenth most deprived district of 354 districts in England.

The Gold Standard of Care Albany has hit back at the hospital taking away women’s birth choices and forcing them down the medicalised hospital route.

The perinatal mortality rate in the Albany’s care was just 4.9 per 1000 women in the years 1997-07, compared to a higher 7.9 per 1000 at King’s .

The Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services is also concerned that home birth choices are being taken away from women.

Instead of having one-to-one care during labour with a midwife they know, women will find themselves in hospital most likely sharing a midwife and finding themselves left alone and frightened during labour.

Consultant obstetrician, Wendy Savage, believes this all mirrors attempts by obstetricians at The London Hospital to strike her off back in 1985.

Wendy said: “The suspension of one of the Albany Midwives and cessation of their practice reminds me of my own suspension in 1985. The same intolerance to alternative ways of providing maternity care, despite comparable outcomes for the babies and lower Caesarean section rates, the same technique of selecting cases with adverse outcomes without looking at the overall care, and the same refusal to look at what the women themselves want. I hope that King’s will listen to those who consider this suspension an outrage and reinstate the midwife and the service immediately.”

For more information about the campaign, visit:  www.savethealbany.org.uk