Coronavirus baby boom? Maternity wards report spike in births

Nine months after the first lockdown began, maternity wards across the country are seeing a spike in births. “Let’s keep it simple”,maternity nurse Patricia Veth said to RTL Nieuws “Due to having to stay at home, couples have found more time for each other.”

Director of the Research Center for Maternity Care, Esther van der Zwan, says to RTL Nieuws that in maternity care there is no in-between. It is either extremely busy or extremely quiet. And currently, the situation is definitely the former.

At De Krammvogel, one of the largest maternity care wards in the country, it is all hands on deck. “It is not an enormous spike", Vannou Krikke from De Krammvogel explains. "We are handling the situation with joy, but it is definitely linked back to the first lockdown.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the pressure at the maternity ward has also been growing due to high rates of absenteeism among colleagues. “We’ve been dealing with high rates of absenteeism of over a year now”, says Esther van der Ark from the Dutch Maternity Ward Worker’s Union.

Additionally, there is a shortage of maternity ward nurses in some regions because of high retirement rates. “Many maternity ward nurses are more than 45-years-old. There is nothing wrong with that. But we have noticed in the past couple of years that there are more nurses retiring than there are young people choosing to work in this profession.”

Van der Zwan said the reason why many from the younger generation prefer to work in hospitals or nursing homes is because these areas offer more stability. “They know when and how much to work. Maternity care is more irregular when it comes to that.”