Minister talking ‘fiction’ on midwife numbers?

Well, you would say that, wouldn't you? That's often what I suspect people – including politicians, journalists and managers within the health service – are thinking when the RCM talks about the midwife shortage. We're a union (as well as a professional organisation), so we're bound to bang the drum for more midwives. At the back of their mind I am sure they suspect that we'd still be calling for more midwives even if there were 10 for every pregnant woman in the country! So, it's nice when some independent analysis comes along and backs us up.

Channel 4 News runs an online 'fact check' service, which takes statements that are made, often by politicians, and judges whether they are fact or fiction. On 21 February they took a quote from Conservative health minister Simon Burns and put it under the microscope. In a Conservative press release, the minister said: ‘It makes a huge difference to patients that there are now more midwives working in the NHS than ever before.’ 

The FactCheck team found that while the latest figure – for November 2011 – is the highest on record, the records only go back to 1995 and the numbers aren't final but provisional. The thoroughly checked and audited numbers should appear next month. Indeed, I know the exact spreadsheet of workforce figures that the minister is quoting from and it is marked ‘provisional’ and ‘experimental’, so we can be excused for not relying on it.

Secondly, they test his assertion that this rise has made ‘a huge difference’. This is where the journalists writing this pick up on something that we bang on about endlessly – that the number of midwives cannot be seen purely in isolation – one has to look at workload as well, and a rough and ready way of assessing this is the number of babies. Now, there is more to a midwife's workload than just the number of babies (I know! I know!), but it's a useful indicator nonetheless.

As the site points out, not only have births gone up in England, but they are projected to keep on going up, meaning we need even more midwives just to keep pace (let alone to plug the shortfall).

It's good too to see the prime minister brought to book for his dropped promise to hire 3000 more midwives into the NHS in England. Added to that, it's also good to see the government get a rap across the knuckles for saying they abandoned that promise because the number of births is dropping when nothing of the sort is happening.

The judgement of the Channel 4 journalist who looked into this is summed up at the top of the webpage, with the dial showing 'fact' on one side and 'fiction' on the other. This shows their overall assessment of what the minister said and they sum up what the minister had to say as ‘fiction’!

That's not us saying that, that's the independent assessment of Channel 4's FactCheck website. Once you've read what they have to say, why not leave a comment on there (just scroll down for the comment bit) and share it on facebook and twitter? Let others know that we mean it when we tell them there aren't enough midwives.

(Picture courtesy of brokenarts)