Crisis in childbirth care this summer - more than 1,000 work passes unmanned

Throughout Stockholm there are no midwives for more than 1,000 work sessions during the holiday weeks. At the delivery clinics in Gothenburg and Västerbotten, more than 100 work passes for midwives were unmanned at the beginning of the summer.

- In some places, a situation has been created where you even more claim that midwives should be loyal and set up. We have been doing this for years and now there is no power left. Water cannot be squeezed out of a rock. It's over, says Eva Nordlund, chair of the Swedish Children's Mothers' Association.

At Danderyds Hospital in Stockholm, the extra passport compensation has been reduced because staff already receive an extra compensation during the corona pandemic. This has led to several midwives not wanting to take extra work. But now they have begun to do so when the compensation, after pressure from the unions, was increased but with the requirement that the staff must stay at the workplace by November and not resign.

- Everyone who can and wants to work extra, we want to give them the opportunity and we want to give them extra pass compensation. But then we want it to be the same for intensive care nurses, emergency nurses and midwives who take extra care, says Patrik Söderberg, chief physician in the Stockholm region.

Following SVT's interview with Chief Physician Patrik Söderberg, Region Stockholm announces in a press release that the staffing crisis has been resolved. But when we repeatedly ask how it could be resolved so quickly, one cannot answer from Danderyd's hospital how many work passes have been staffed.

At the same time, the supervisory authority Inspection for Care and Care, Ivo, has opened an investigation into the delivery care at Danderyds hospital. Because the large staffing problem can affect patient safety.

We know from the Midwives' Association that there are still hundreds of unmanned passports at Danderyds hospital and over 1,000 passports at the maternity wards in Stockholm County alone.

For the first time in Västerbotten, Värmland, Västmanland and Örebro, the collective agreement has been used to move holiday weeks to September to resolve the staffing crisis.

- The money now solves the emergency and they have to do it. But in the long term, midwife staffing must increase, says Eva Nordlund.

To resolve the situation in the long term, she wants the number of hours that make up full-time work to be reduced and ensure that midwives do not have to jump into other departments during the summer.