- Wednesday, April 24, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
Shubham Ghosh
RACIAL discrimination and bullying on maternity wards could have disastrous impact for both mothers and babies, the head of the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC) has warned.
Charlie Massey, the chief executive and registrar of the doctors’ watchdog, said young medics working in obstetrics and gynaecology were at a greater risk to be undermined by their peers and get less support than colleagues who are in other specialisations, The Telegraph reported. He also said that doctors from ethnic minorities feel less supported than those from the white community.
Massey’s remarks came in the wake of a series of National Health Service maternity scandals in recent years, the latest being the one at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust, where an investigation found more than a dozen women and 40 children died because of unsafe care.
According to Massey, a former director general at the UK Department of Health, the risk of unsafe care could lead to “absolutely tragic” human cost.
Speaking at the NHS Confederation Conference, the GMC chief cited data to say that obstetrics and gynaecology trainees confess that they experience more bullying and are also more likely to change to other specialties because they feel less well supported than their counterparts in other specialities.
Massey also said that it is a profession that loses more of its newly-appointed consultants than others and also it is an area where doctors from ethnic minorities feel they are more at a disadvantage than their white counterparts.
Culture, leadership also matter, says GMC chief
“Culture and leadership are also frequent themes. This manifests itself in a lack of honesty, poor clinical governance and poor teamwork between the different professions, and it too often it leads to missed opportunities to learn and a failure to spot problems at an early stage,” Massey said.
The Ockenden Report into the scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford, which was published last December, found the trust having failed to conduct a proper probe into cases of poor care by the staff members over decades. That included not giving women choice at birth and forcing them to undergo painful forceps deliveries resulting in babies having broken bones.
This inquiry is looking into nearly 1,870 cases of poor care.
