Maternity Wards Set For Crisis Over Bed Shortages

Doctors believe Scotland’s biggest city is set to face a shortage of maternity beds as the birth rate continues to defy forecasts of sharp decline. One of Glasgow’s three maternity hospitals, the Queen Mother’s at Yorkhill, is scheduled to close at some point between this year and 2009, leaving the city with capacity to deliver just 12,000 babies a year.

Yet the city is currently handling more than 11,800 births a year and even traditionally pessimistic NHS planners believe the figure will hold up for years to come. Current levels of deliveries would mean Glasgow’s two surviving maternities, at the Princess Royal and Southern General hospitals, will have to work at 99% capacity.

Some obstetricians believe that is completely unrealistic.

“We keep telling them that there isn’t enough room,” said one senior clinician, who declined to be named, fearing reprisals. “But the board is not listening.”

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde yesterday insisted it was unaware of such concerns.

A spokeswoman said: “Our assumptions for the number of deliveries per bed sit comfortably within the range of births per bed experienced elsewhere.

“These assumptions have been tested fully with clinical colleagues and no concerns have been raised about future capacity.

“It is anticipated that births for Glasgow will remain at 2005 levels. We are confident, however, that we have the flexibility to respond to an increase in birth rates, if required.”

Pauline McNeill, a Glasgow Labour MSP with close links to clinicians, was not convinced yesterday. “Having looked at the figures recently, it looks exceptionally tight to me,” she said. “And if births increase, there will need to be some decision about how they are going to deal with that.”

Birth episodes at the three Glasgow hospitals were officially measured at 11,858 in 2005-2006 and 11,881 in 2004-2005. Glasgow’s population has bounced back far faster than anybody anticipated, not least NHS officials previously planning for continuing decline.

The city in 2005 recorded its first real growth in population since the 1920s, partly thanks to a stream of migrants from Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Some of those migrants are putting down roots and starting families – just as First Minister Jack McConnell hoped. Glasgow City Council now expects births to outstrip deaths by 2014.

Maternity hospitals in Glasgow, of course, also cater for pregnant women from outwith the city.

Hospitals such as the Queen Mother’s – which has a physical link to Scotland’s top paediatricians at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children – attract patients from all over Europe.

Its popularity has not been diminished by its imminent closure and continued downgrading. An entire ward was last year moved to the Princess Royal, the maternity unit at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, to cope with vulnerable women. Birth numbers at the Queen Mother’s held up, at 3454 in 2006 and 3493 in 2005.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is currently finalising an outline business case for a new children’s hospital to replace Yorkhill. Concerns, as revealed in The Herald last week, are mounting over the size of the new hospital and the way it will be financed. Internal NHS documents suggest a joint PFI will be proposed for the new Yorkhill and a new adult hospital for the Southern.

Doctors, however, remain worried about the size and quality of the Southern’s existing maternity unit, one of the few parts of the existing hospital campus to survive a massive rebuilding programme.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde has declined to comment on the Southern maternity until its business case for the new children’s hospital is approved.