Hurry up Nurse 3: More adventures in the life of a student nurse by Brookes Dawn

Author:Brookes, Dawn [Brookes, Dawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oakwood Publishing
Published: 2019-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Mat Unit

The maternity unit was a large separate building with its own car park and ambulance bay, its entrance on the west side of the hospital. It was like a hospital within a hospital, with its own administrative offices, library, school of midwifery and outpatients departments on the ground floor. The labour ward and theatres were on the first floor, and antenatal and postnatal wards on the second.

I made a mistake in terminology on my first day and suffered a quick reprimand I wouldn’t forget.

‘We are not nurses, we are midwives,’ said the rather rotund sister. The truth was that once nurses became midwives, they argued that midwives were very different to nurses, and who was I to disagree? In the early 1980s, a nurse who wanted to become a midwife did an extra year’s training (later that decade it was extended to eighteen months, shortly before I began training to be a midwife in the mid-1980s). On completion of the training they became registered midwives (RMs), but also kept their nurse registration. Nowadays, many midwives enter through a direct-entry training programme.

As a student nurse, I found the labour ward placement particularly dull. Not because seeing babies being delivered wasn’t fascinating – it was, and I did manage to see the required five births that were a mandatory part of my training in order to pass the placement, but we were always at the back of the queue when it came to seeing anything. Ahead of us were student midwives, medical students, junior doctors, and basically the world and its brother. On top of that, we were not allowed to do anything except check blood pressures, test urine and palpate the mandatory five pregnant abdomens, which made for long and boring shifts. I couldn’t even speak to women in labour, perhaps because they had other things on their minds, but it didn’t help the days go any more quickly on the ward. Years later, when I was a midwife, the labour ward was my favourite place of work and I was promoted to midwifery sister, working on one of the busiest labour wards in the country.

Each labour room had a door – obviously – and a small square window decorated with frosted glass stripes, allowing just enough clear glass for the midwife in charge to take a peek through without intruding on what was going on inside the room. One afternoon I was accompanying the midwifery sister along the corridor and we peeked into one of the rooms from which we could hear a lot of noise, although it wasn’t unusual to hear the “cry of the banshee” coming from labour rooms. A father-to-be stood at the foot of the bed and the midwife was gowned up and proficiently delivering the baby while he looked on. Then I blinked, and he’d disappeared. One minute he was there, the next, he was gone .

The sister I was with chuckled. ‘Whoops, there goes another one.’

Upon opening the door, we saw the woman who had just given birth cuddling her newborn.

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