Over the past few years targeting of midwives by the press in the UK has become an almost weekly pastime. Not decrying the horrific stories coming from distressed parents, is there a different narrative that is being missed? Following one such report Leah Hazard, midwife and author, asked questions and dug deeper. For those who follow her on social media the stories related by midwives are harrowing and disturbing. As a result, a petition to improve working conditions has followed. She encourages us to share and sign.
Many of us in the birth world are aware of the media circus surrounding the tragic deaths of Jennifer and Agnes Cahill last July. Jennifer, who had chosen to give birth to her baby, Agnes, at home after a previous traumatic birth in hospital, was painted in the mainstream press as irresponsible and extreme. Likewise, the midwives who attended her were described as bungling and incompetent. As a home-birthing mother and a midwife myself, the story moved me deeply.
When the coroner’s report was published in October. I was shocked to realise that the truth of what happened on that awful day last July was almost unrecognisable from what had been portrayed in the media. Joanne Kearsley, the senior coroner for Manchester North, describes Jen in her report as ‘entirely reasonable’, and while mistakes were certainly made during and after Agnes’s birth, one line in the report sent a chill down my spine. Kearsley states that, by the time the two midwives attending Jen had completed their documentation of events, they had ‘been awake for an extremely long time, by now over 30 hours.’
While the errors in Jen’s intrapartum care cannot be entirely explained by fatigue, one cannot ignore the fact that those two community midwives had been awake long enough to be cognitively impaired – a well-established consequence of sleep deprivation. As a mainly hospital-based midwife, I wondered whether this was a common occurrence – were most community midwives expected to be on call overnight, after a full working day of clinics and visits? I posed the question to my Instagram following – a cross-section of midwives and others from across the UK – and the response was overwhelming.
Stories flooded in from midwives in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They told me that, far from being the exception, working patterns like those of Jen Cahill’s midwives were the norm. Many, many midwives are routinely expected to work a full day, provide on-call provision to both home and hospital births overnight, and then work again the following day as normal. Those who push back, telling their managers that they are too exhausted to provide safe care, are often reprimanded, bullied, disciplined or silenced. As long as the service is running, it seems, safety is a secondary consideration.
And safety is most definitely being compromised. Midwives told me they had come to serious harm during and after such excessively long shifts; some crashed their cars, some developed significant mental health issues, some endured extreme stress while working through pregnancies of their own, and some felt pushed to leave the NHS completely. As for the service users themselves, poor outcomes and near misses appear to be routine consequences of staff exhaustion. Midwives confided that they had made errors in CTG interpretation, emergency manoeuvres, drug administration and basic care during periods of extreme sleep deprivation.
At a time when UK maternity services are in a state of deep crisis, these harms due to staff exhaustion constitute an entirely preventable risk. Time and again, politicians and NHS leaders reiterate the importance of providing safe care, whether in the broad context of the Patient Safety Strategy, or in light of the more alarm raised by Baroness Amos’ interim report into NHS England maternity. There can be no excuse, then, for ignoring the ongoing and large-scale dangers of an exhausted maternity workforce.
Midwifery absolutely must be brought into line with other safety-critical roles such as bus, coach and HGV drivers, pilots, air traffic controllers and rail staff. While people in those jobs have legally binding rights and protections – caps on their hours, and mandatory breaks – midwives have no such safety net; consequently, nor do the people in their care. One can only surmise that a service provided predominantly by women, for women, is not deemed as worthy of such regulations as those provided predominantly by men. This disparity should be seen as a national scandal and must be rectified.
As a midwife, I have a duty of candour to disclose and escalate risks to the public. As such, I have shared many of the stories I’ve received (anonymously, with consent) on social media, and I have begun a petition to establish legally enforceable caps on midwives’ working hours, along with mandatory rest breaks. I’ve been in midwifery long enough to be pessimistic about the prospect and pace of change, but the stories I’ve been entrusted with are too heartbreaking for me to sit by and do nothing. Please join me in the push for positive change, sign the petition and share it widely among your colleagues and friends.
https://www.change.org/p/establish-legal-limits-on-midwives-working-hours
Leah Hazard is a midwife and the author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story, and Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began. Her next book, Birth Wars, will be published by Penguin in autumn 2026.
Leah Hazard
December 2025