midwife's muse

Lesson learned

Working yesterday and covering my other team members work. One of their cases has a child protection order on the baby, limited details available to me, just says needs daily visits from us, twice weekly from the Social Worker, whilst they decide whether to keep the baby with her. I hate 'cold calling', when there are unusual circumstances, and I don't know the whole story, you have no idea what you might be about to confront. Ususlly, when we have any special cases we let ech other know everything that's going on, but this girl is staying with relatives so we had not had the usual run-up during pregnancy, just had her discharged to our care. Anyway, went round there, warned by student that the house was disgusting and that they had a large Alsation that jumps up at you. Knocked on the door and the barking commenced, door opened by the girls Mother and Alsation leaps for me. In my most authorative voice I said that I didn't do dogs, please could they shut it away. If looks could kill, I was a dead Midwife walking, but she did as I asked, turned away, walked to a door, shouted,' Come and deal with this', and left us standing in the hallway. The Girl appeared, and informed us that baby wasn't there, it had gone with it's Dads parents to their home in a different area. I asked if she had informed the Social Worker, negative response. Right, could I have their address and phone number, she didn't know it. Alarm bells started clanging. Then she told me that the previous night baby had not seemed well so they had called the on-call doctor, who had refused to come out, but had advised them to take baby to hospital, but they hadn't gone because she had no means of getting there.

I left the house, my brain had gone into overdrive. Oh s**t. This is like the cases you read about, 19 midwives visited, 3 Health Visitors, Social Services, and all the time some child is being abused, and they havn't noticed. I phoned up the on-call manger for her input, phone the duty Social Worker. I duly did this (passes the buck), told her all that had happened, and got on with my other visits. A couple of hours later the SW phones me, they had phoned the girl, she had said that baby would me coming back later that evening, and the SW asks me to visit then. I declined the offer. My thoughts are that this baby has a child protection order in place, therefore if there are any irregularities Social Services should investigate. However, student and I learned a valuable lesson, don't just read what the papers say, think about the mechanisms going on. We are very quick to judge and say how awful that everyone ignored warning signs, did nothing etc., we had all been visiting in this case, but there is very little we can do as community workers on a 24 hour basis. Hopefully baby is fine, equally though anything could have happened to it, and how would that have been reported in the papers?

SIL is out of hospital, feeling better than he did, but looking terrible. Terrible sickness overnight so daughter, who had been at work, was called home.

Amy has given up her bottom bouncing and is now crawling.

The cats have destroyed our new carpet and are now consigned to the utility room overnight. Second set of jabs on Thursday then outside.

13.2.06 10:51