Two-thirds of maternity nurses feel families need more care than they can provide

Due to shortages in maternity care, nearly two-thirds of maternity nurses feel that they are unable to provide sufficient care to the families in their care, Nieuwsuur found in a survey of 335 maternity nurses. 40 percent said that the baby needs more help than they have time or capacity to provide.

If there were no shortages, parents in the Netherlands would receive 49 hours of maternity care spread over several days. The law states that parents are entitled to at least 24 hours of maternity care. But even that is often not met due to the shortage of maternity nurses.

Insufficient maternity care can be harmful to babies. The biggest problem the surveyed nurses mentioned was breastfeeding issues because they didn’t have enough time to help. If they notice too late that the baby isn’t drinking enough, they can lose too much weight or become dehydrated, sometimes resulting in the baby having to be hospitalized.

The shortage of maternity nurses also affects mothers. Nurses cited examples of women not getting enough rest or cesarean section wounds becoming infected.

Several hospitals told Nieuwsuur that new mothers sometimes have to stay with them longer because they don’t have maternity care at home, leading to higher healthcare costs and more pressure on another overburdened system.

The program spoke to a new mother who found out upon arriving home from the hospital that no maternity nurses were available, despite her registering with the agency months in advance. So, no one was there to check on the mother and the baby. That same night, the woman suffered an internal bleed and lost four liters of blood. “In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, I thought: if I close my eyes now, I don’t know if I’ll ever open them again.”

There’s no way to say whether a maternity nurse could have detected this secondary hemorrhage. “But there was no one to check on me. And what I do know for sure: if I had been told earlier that a maternity nurse wouldn’t be coming, I would have had to stay in the hospital. And then the consequences of the hemorrhage would have been much less severe.”

Last month, Nieuwsuur reported that maternity care is no longer even available everywhere in the Netherlands. Some healthcare organizations are closing operations in certain areas, particularly in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods.