No babies born in Kirklees hospitals for over a year

Concerns are being raised about staff shortages in NHS maternity services as, aside from home births, NO babies have been born in the whole of Kirklees in over a year.

The birthing facilities at both Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and Dewsbury and District Hospital are currently closed. Huddersfield Birth Centre’s services were suspended in March 2020 as a “temporary response to Covid pressures,” with the site yet to reopen due to ongoing staffing issues.

The Bronte Birth Centre at Dewsbury closed its doors in May last year due to staff shortages, meaning women in Kirklees who want to give birth in hospital have to travel to Calderdale Royal in Halifax or Pinderfields in Wakefield.

'That option is being taken away'

Mum-of-three Amarrah is a hypnobirthing instructor at Little Lavender Birth School. She lives three minutes from the Bronte Birth Centre but had to give birth at Pinderfields.

“I teach people about how having your birth environment as being somewhere that’s calming and comfortable for you does make labour easier and less painful.

“The birth centre at Dewsbury, and the one at Pinderfields…they’re gorgeous places, made to be really homely and comfortable. But that option is being taken away.

“They feel like they’re put under pressure because they’re told ‘no you have to come to the hospital.’ Then they end up waiting on a corridor… and sometimes they’re giving birth and there’s not somebody there with them because of the shortages.

“What ends up happening is you are more likely to have a birth that has some form of intervention because you’re nervous and you’re anxious, so your body doesn’t work in the same way. So in a sense you end up needing more staff because then you’re having to include the doctors in it.

“We’re getting back to the very medicated feel to birth which we were starting to move away from. It’s as if the NHS did know that for birth to be more effective and to need less intervention, you need it to be in that lovely environment… they’ve created these birth centres… and then now they’re taking it away because they don’t have the staff.”

'Sad state of affairs'

The closure of the Bronte Birth Centre was raised in Parliament by Batley and Spen MP Kim Leadbeater last summer. She and her parents officially opened the £1.4m centre in 2016 in memory of her sister and former MP Jo Cox, who was involved in the project before she died.

“I think it’s a really sad state of affairs that women cannot choose to give birth in Kirklees,” Kim says.

“If I was a pregnant woman, I’d like to think I had the choice of where to give birth to my baby and it looks like we’re taking that choice away.

“I just hope that the government pulls its finger out and starts looking properly at the retention and recruitment issues in the NHS and how we can keep local facilities at the heart of local communities.”

A recent meeting of Kirklees Council’s Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Panel heard that Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust (CHFT) has an “aspiration” to open its Huddersfield birthing facility next Summer, but could not give a firm assurance that this would be met.

In a statement, Talib Yaseen, Chief Nursing Officer at Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS Trust, said: “We unfortunately had to temporarily close the midwife-led Bronte Birth Centre in May of last year when staffing levels fell below those necessary to provide a safe level of care.

“We continuously assess the potential to reopen Bronte Birth Centre as a venue for women to birth – it remains open as a hub, providing antenatal and postnatal care and, as a Trust, we continue to offer a full range of birthing options to all women and families.

“Nationally, both recruitment and retention within maternity services remain a challenge, but we are committed to addressing this with robust recruitment drives, the recruitment of international midwives into our teams, an excellent preceptorship programme for newly qualified midwives, and support for existing and returning midwives.”

The government insists the 15-year long term NHS workforce plan announced last week will meet the workforce requirements the health service has for the future.

It includes what it’s calling the ‘largest ever expansion in domestic education and training places’, with 24,000 more nurse and midwife training places a year by 2031.