Baby born outside -4C temp maternity staff didn't hear mother pressing buzzer

Can I just say....

I AM NOT A NURSE!!!!!!!!!

The newspapers ALWAYS call midwives nurses when there's a story that is detrimental to midwives. Why?

Anyway, back to the story. Ok, I understand that to the woman and her family, it quite probably was very a traumatic and humiliating experience. However, despite the fact that the woman rang ahead, as Butterfly pointed out, in a system with barely enough beds or staff to cope with the huge amount of babies arriving, it is very possible that there may not have been someone there to answer the buzzer at the time that she arrived in very advanced labour.
It's unfortunate that they pressed the wrong buzzer, but the papers are making out that it took staff 6 minutes to get to the door, when in fact, that's not the case at all! Surely the people with the woman can read the sign which would have pointed out which buzzer to press???

I'm sure that the family are also using hindsight to make the situation more dramatic in their own minds. The comment "He could have hit his head on the pavement" made me sigh a bit - even if she were on her own, her natural reaction would have been to protect him from harm as he was born. Looking back and thinking "what if" will always make a situation seem far worse than it actually was.

On the unit I work in, we have the main maternity entrance doors which are locked at night. The mat unit is then on the 2nd floor, so it's up in a lift for the women, then there is another set of locked doors and a security guard. It's not often that we get babies born in the lift or at the front doors, but it does happen. That's life, labour is unpredictable, and us "nurses" don't have the capacity to predict it - our pockets aren't big enough to carry crystal balls around with us...

So the lady went to the labour ward in advanced labour, pressed the buzzer within minutes the baby was born... how is that the fault of the staff there? Sounds like even if they had arrived to help her any earlier she'd have given birth infront of strangers. I'm sure they'd have something more to say if the security wasn't as tight as it is to get into the building and some drunken person burst in or someone tried to steal a baby.
I don't get the point in going to the papers for this, they probably didn't even get paid to share their story.

lol... i didn't see this response before i wrote mine. Also agree, if the papers instead of putting blame on 'nurses' focused on putting the blame on where it really lies (the government cuts e.t.c.) then maybe it would give healthcare professionals a bit more of the recognition they deserve for working in such conditions. Maybe the papers should be working towards making the government realise their responsiblities rather than having such over worked nhs staff who give everything they can but then get blamed for anything the system lets them down for.