COVID-19 reaches 'absolute peak' in Derriford Hospital's maternity ward
Half of the women in the labour ward have contracted the virus
COVID in Derriford’s maternity ward has reached “an absolute peak’ in recent weeks, with an average of around half the women there having COVID on any one day.
Sue Wilkins, director of mass vaccination, flu and testing at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust told a meeting of Plymouth City Council’s health and wellbeing board the number includes all women on the ward, not just those going through labour.
“If anyone is at any part of their maternity journey and is COVID positive, their care will be provided on the labour ward because we don’t want to transfer them to another ward,” she said.
Some women are having longer stays on the ward because staff do not want to move someone who is infectious to another part of the hospital.
Ms Wilkins said there are ‘red zones’ for patients with diagnosed or expected COVID, “and we’ve gotten quite used to using walkie-talkies to aid communication between the teams to minimise them entering red areas.”
In red zones, patients with COVID are separated from other parts of the hospital to reduce transmission.
Part of the reason for the recent spike is fewer pregnant women having been vaccinated compared to the general population, even though they are at a greater risk of getting seriously ill from COVID.
The Omicron outbreak is just the latest part of what has been an extremely difficult two years for Plymouth’s maternity services.
Ms Wilkins said hospital visits had “probably been the most complicated and tricky thing to manage throughout the pandemic.
“Prolonged separation of parents when patients have required NICU Newborn Intensive Care Unit admission has been devastating for us all to see.”
She said limitations on visitors during childbirth has impacted emotional support for new parents. “It’s increased vulnerability at birth and the postnatal period,” she explained.
“There are no antenatal and postnatal groups providing emotional and practical support and these are a lifeline for many.”
Ms Wilkins said families have felt excluded from maternity care through COVID, with unquantifiable long-term impacts on public health.
She continued: “We can’t fully understand the safeguarding interventions that will have been missed undoubtedly.
“Women have made choices that they wouldn’t have made pre-COVID such as birthing at home against medical advice to avoid coming into the hospital environment.”
The role of midwives became more important during the most severe stages of the pandemic because women could not be with their families because of restricted visiting.
In one case staff had to tell a COVID positive woman, who could not have her family with her in the hospital, that her baby had died.
Four women on Derriford’s labour ward needed to go into intensive Care during the pandemic. None died, although one suffered significant neurological damage.
Ms Wilkins says that when birth partners have been allowed to join mothers the policy has created greater concerns for some NHS staff.
“Maternity staff are constantly asking why, when women have the right to have partners with them but no one else in the hospital has a visitor, do they have to be put at a higher level of risk of exposure, simply by the nature of where they work say compared to a colleague who worked in care for the elderly. It’s been a really difficult road to tread.”
Ms Wilkins says inconsistent messaging has made managing the crisis harder. Since the start of the pandemic, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has delivered 14 different iterations of its pregnancy guidance for maternity staff.
Ms Wilkins praised the teams working in Plymouth’s maternity services.
“What we have seen is absolutely exemplar teamwork. People supporting each other and really the wish to do the very best for families when there have been times when we’ve had probably a third of the workforce we would have had available to us pre-COVID,” she said.