The moment I knew my GP surgery wasn’t listening to me was when I burst into tears in a nurse practitioner’s office. Having quickly looked in my ears and down my throat, the nurse said he couldn’t give me a referral for a medical issue that had been plaguing my life for months. After all, he couldn’t see anything wrong.
At seven months pregnant, I had lost half my hearing overnight and developed a weird clicking sound in my throat. My first GP appointment saw a doctor simply remark about a ‘waxy build-up’ and shrug, seemingly unconcerned by my deep distress – which surely wasn’t helpful for my unborn child either.
By the time I gave birth, I could barely hear the doctors and nurses. My anaesthetist had to shout her instructions as she administered injections in my back, as if undergoing major surgery wasn't already frightening enough.
In spite of that, overall my childbirth experience was a positive one – something that isn't the case for everybody, given 1 in 3 women describe it as 'traumatic' – but, when my son was born, his first cries sounded muffled. An issue that potentially could have been sorted, had I been taken seriously.
After birth, things did not improve either. I suffered a severe mental health breakdown, thanks in part to a nurse who repeatedly told me that if I didn’t sleep properly with a newborn, I could have a seizure and die as a result of my epilepsy. Just one day after my Caesarean section, I developed extreme postnatal insomnia and struggled for months. When I eventually begged a mental health nurse for help, again in tears, she too said there was nothing she could do.
Almost five years on, my hearing has still not returned to normal, the clicking in my throat is still there – and it seems like the way the NHS treats pregnant, postpartum and women more broadly hasn’t improved either.
Everyone's clicking on...
Baroness Amos’s Independent Investigation into Maternity and Neonatal Services in England, published this week, details the results of her national inquiry and reinforces what too many women have known for too long: when it comes to our health, be it maternal, gynaecological or mental, too often we are not taken seriously.
Amos’s report highlights the experiences of thousands of women who have given birth in an NHS hospital. It paints a bleak picture of maternity care in Britain: women describe being dismissed, not listened to and, in some cases, experiencing racism, discrimination and outright bullying. The report also draws on lessons from previous maternity scandals, including Donna Ockenden’s recent review of Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, which found more than 500 mothers and babies died or were harmed because of poor care.
These alarming stats, along with her own experience, are why Hiba Siddiqui, Founder of The Tenth, the UK’s first structured, expert-led maternal recovery programme in partnership with London's Portland Hospital, says she launched her organisation. She hopes to provide the health infrastructure that is sorely lacking when it comes to postpartum care.
After giving birth herself, Siddiqui was discharged as 'normal' following her six-week check-up (which she says felt like a tick-box exercise), only she later discovered she had developed Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disorder that her GP had not picked up on.
“It's high time that maternal healthcare gets [this level of] focus,” Siddiqui tells Cosmopolitan UK. “Maternity care has as much of a listening problem as it does a safety problem. At The Tenth, we see many women describing feeling dismissed, minimised and shuffled from place to place in the system exactly at that moment when they're the most vulnerable.
“When a woman says something doesn't feel right, whether it's in pregnancy, birth, or postpartum, it's often treated as anxiety or noise, but it really should be treated as information.”
But this issue runs deeper than the maternity ward for women: not being listened to by healthcare professionals happens across the board, whether or not they have or would like to have children. From teenage girls to peri- and postmenopausal women, it seems we are united in having our pain and symptoms ignored. The Government’s Women’s Health Strategy found that 84% of women felt they had, at some point, not been listened to by healthcare professionals.
Most of us can think of women within our family and friendship circle who suffer from painful periods, PMOS or endometriosis, only to have their experience glossed over by doctors. How many of our mums and aunts were perimenopausal but had no idea, because the symptoms they were experiencing were chalked up to ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety’?
This culture of being poorly treated by healthcare professionals is compounded for women of colour, particularly those who speak English as another language. The latest Five X More report found that over a quarter of Black women using NHS maternity services experienced racial discrimination, but campaigners have long argued that these biases don't begin or end in the delivery room.
There’s also the colloquially termed ‘Bibi Syndrome’ or ‘Begum Syndrome’, which describes the racist stereotyping of South Asian women as being ‘fussy’ or exaggerating symptoms. I only need to think of the way my Pakistani mother-in-law was treated on the same day she had a major heart attack; she was ignored by a nurse several times when requesting painkillers, while White patients in beds next to her had their requests fulfilled.
As a result of Baroness Amos’s inquiry, the Department for Health and Social Care says it plans to appoint a Maternity and Neonatal Commissioner, expand its maternal mental health services and invest a further £41 million to improve maternity and neonatal safety. These are positive steps, but I can’t help but think of all the women in Britain who continue to grieve the loss of their babies and for whom this is too late. Of the women living with long-term physical injuries or psychological trauma as a result of a broken healthcare system that too often dismisses us. It's not enough to simply inspect maternity services and report the bad news, time after time – the recommendations that follow must actually be acted upon.
The first piece of advice that Amos includes in her list is simple: nothing will actually change if you don’t listen to women.
“The future of women's health has to be built around the idea that we are the experts of our own bodies,” agrees Siddiqui. “This applies to maternity, postpartum, fertility and menopause. All of it.”
And this idea – of listening to women – isn't a radical one (or at least it shouldn't be). It's the bare minimum. The real test now is whether anyone finally does it.
