Not quite a midwife crisis

SWITCH on a TV, and it really can seem like there’s one born every minute. There has been a stream of documentaries and a hit period drama recently about midwives, and the trend continues with Home Delivery.

Every new arrival brings a story with it, whether it’s tense, funny or heartwarming, and this latest new addition is no exception, especially as it focuses on an area that hasn’t always been explored in other documentaries – home births.

Fifty years ago, 30 per cent of UK babies were born at home, but now it’s less than three per cent. But for those mumsto- be who don’t want to go into hospital, there are options.

For example, the women of Kent can call on independent midwife Virginia, who attends nearly 30 births a year, nearly all of them at the mother’s home.

Virginia doesn’t have the most conventional professional background.

“I was a nurse for two years first, but before that... I was a kissogram. I earned quite a good living taking my clothes off.

I used to burst out of birthday cakes and sit on old men’s knees.

“I always thought, ‘Oh I wish I’d been a midwife’ and then one day I thought, ‘what do you mean, wish you had been.

You’re only 30, get on and do it, woman’.”

She took her own advice, and it seems it was the right decision, as even after 16 years, she still gets plenty of job satisfaction.

“I just love it when women look up at me and say thank you because I know I haven’t done anything. What she’s really saying is ‘thank you, you empowered me to do it myself’.

“I still want to leave the house and go up to the first person I see and say, ‘a baby’s just been born in there’. It’s still exciting for me, after all these years.”

Here, we get to meet some of Virginia’s clients, including Julie, who has chosen to set up a birthing pool in her dining room so that her eight-year-old son can be there to see the arrival of his new sibling.

Lindsay wanted her first child, twoyear- old Henry, to be born at home, but was transferred to a hospital for a forceps delivery, and is keen not to repeat the experience.

For her, the personal touch makes a big difference. “My whole thing was when I got transferred to hospital, I didn’t know that person.

“And that was really scary... it was some random person that had never met me. That I didn’t like.”

FRASIER star Kelsey Grammer leads the cast of new US drama Boss as Tom Kane, the mayor of Chicago, who is a firm believer that the ends justify the means.

As his sometimes dubious methods usually get results, the city’s other movers and shakers are prepared to look the other way.

However, they may want to start keeping a more watchful eye on Kane as the politician is diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder.

He refuses to make the news public, not even confiding in his wife Meredith (Connie Nielsen), while his closest aides keep their suspicions to themselves.

But as Kane’s memory begins to slip, can he really avoid giving himself away?

MOST of us know what it’s like to be under a certain amount of pressure at work – but some professions have more at stake than most.

For some people, a slip in concentration at the workplace can have genuinely devastating consequences.

In the Horizon documentary How to Avoid Mistakes in Surgery, Dr Kevin Fong looks at some of the coping mechanisms people in such lines of work employ, in order to prevent the stress becoming too much to bear and keep mistakes from being made.

By speaking to workers in various highpressure careers, including airline pilots, firefighters and Formula One pit workers, he explores the different tactics which they each employ when faced with emergency situations.

Then the programme asks if any of these techniques could be of use in another specialist field, in which splitsecond decisions really do mean the difference between life and death – that of surgery.