Masses of bodies
Tue 4th Dec 2007 by Ben Palmer.I feel full of despair. Although I haven't seen a full copy of the Saving Mothers' Lives report, I have had sections of it read to me, and other parts have been reproduced in various news articles today - most probably from a heavily edited press release.
All of the talk is of obesity and migrant mothers. This is a distortion of what I know to be true. When the report says that deaths due to substandard care have not risen, are we supposed to applaud the NHS?
Jessica died because of substandard care, from a disease that has been known about for hundreds of years, and is easily treated.
The number of deaths from genital tract sepsis (ie childbed fever, pueperal fever) has gone up by 38%. Is it just me that thinks this is a scandal, and totally unacceptable?
The sense that I am getting is that the NHS and the government are not bothered by the increasing death rate, are not bothered about a properly funded and properly run maternity service because the statistics meet some unknown target. Instead they are blaming us for their failure to be aware, to treat and to run a modern health service.
There is a twist though. Jessica was a petite, middle class, 34 year old woman. Her post mortem report, however, gives her height as 1.61m and her post delivery weight as 82kg. The NHS Direct website has just told me that this means that her Body Mass Index would be 31.6, which is classed as obese.
This is utterly ridiculous - she was anything but overweight, as anybody who knew her would testify to, and the clothes she wore pre pregnancy were size 8-10. I couldn't really believe that she would be classed as obese, so I referred to her medical notes:
In August 2002, when not pregnant, her GP recorded a height of 1.64m and a weight of 55kg. This gives a BMI of 20.45 which is an "ideal weight".
In April 2004, when seven months pregnant, she was 61.9kg (and presumably still the same height) which gives a BMI of 23.01 which is still an ideal weight even for someone who isn't pregnant.
Somewhere between April and June she apparently lost 3cm in height and gained 20kg, even after Emily was delivered, making her an obese statistic. How many other anomalies are there in "Saving Mothers' Lives" that enable them to blame mothers for their own maternal death, I wonder?
