As an NHS midwife and internationally recognised expert on healthcare and human rights, I am deeply concerned about an issue affecting the safety of UK maternity staff and service users; specifically, midwives' working hours. 

Currently, many midwives in a wide variety of settings across the UK are required to work long shifts with no legally eneforceable right to compulsory rest breaks or relief. Midwives who provide on-call cover for home and hospital births are especially vulnerable, as they are often expected to provide overnight care with few or no breaks, having already worked a full clinical day shift. This can result in midwives being awake and delivering complex, challenging care over a period of 24 hours or more.

In other safety-critical industries such as aviation, the railways and bus, lorry and HGV driving, strict limits exist on working hours and obligatory rest breaks are mandated to protect staff and to prevent errors that may cause harm to the public. In contrast, midwives are unprotected by such measures, despite the fact that they are expected to provide complex, life-saving care. While the Working Time Regulations go some way towards setting out safe rest breaks during and between shifts, midwives report that these regulations are routinely flouted, and there appears to be no UK-wide mechanism to ensure adherence. Many staff are expected to opt out of the WTR as part of their standard terms of employment, exposing them to even less protection in the workplace.

The emotional and physical demands of midwifery are profound, and exhaustion compounds these challenges. Fatigue has been proven to cause cognitive impairment, a preventable risk to which vulnerable women, birthing people and babies should not be exposed. Midwives have shared their experiences of coming to and causing significant harm due to exhaustion: making clinical errors, experiencing severe ill health and psychological distress, enduring their own pregnancy losses while working without breaks, and even crashing their cars. Many midwives have left the profession as a result of these difficult circumstances.

UK maternity services are in a state of emergency. Numerous inspections and reviews across the four nations have demonstrated the complexity and breadth of this crisis, but staff exhaustion is a preventable and solvable problem. Legally enforceable, role-specific limits on midwives’ working hours must be established as a matter of urgency, and should be a central tenet in any service-wide reform.

Please support this simple step to make birth safer for staff and service users. Sign the petition today.