NHS Maternity Gender Inclusion Programme – you couldn’t make it up

Thursday/Friday blog

I’ll start with part of a comment made by a reader yesterday in response to my blog about the NHS hiring ever more DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers:

I think it means they want some long-haired, body-pierced, probably tattooed, preferably B, T or Q individual, whose sole ability is to bore a roomful of actual workers to death, to devise “seminars” utilising all the latest woke speak on “equality” and “diversity”, which hard-working and underpaid NHS actual workers – doctors, nurses, paramedics, porters, etc. – who together constitute the most culturally and racially diverse work force in the country and have worked happily together for years, will be compelled to attend, thus pulling them out of ambulances and off wards where they are already sorely overworked due to understaffing. You couldn’t make it up. I know the truth whereof I write, since several members of my family work in the NHS and have been compelled to waste their time attending such skill squandering events.

Just to add to this, I suspect that at these pointless ‘seminars’ all attendees will be coerced into admitting they have ‘unconscious bias’ against transpersons or people of colour or whatever other supposedly ‘oppressed minority’ is fashionable. Furthermore, I suspect that any medic failing to admit to their ‘unconscious bias’ will have this marked in their personnel records and may even find this limits their career development.

All a bit reminiscent of Mao’s China’s re-education sessions for bourgeois intellectuals?

The NHS’s Maternity Gender Inclusion Programme

This brings us to the NHS’s latest great idea – The Maternity Gender Inclusion Programme.

We all know there have been major problems at many NHS maternity units. Partly these have been due to a lack of midwives and partly due to mismanagement. The latest was the scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford hospital where over 200 babies and at least 9 mothers died due to poor care.

But worry you not. The NHS is taking action. Our envy-of-the-world NHS has found out that: “trans and non-binary birthing parents often concealed their gender or trans status in order to more safely navigate their care and to avoid transphobia“.

Now I’m a bit lost at this point. I admit that I don’t have any medical training. But I have a vague idea, based on my very limited practical experience, of which sex/gender can have babies and which can’t. Moreover, there’s a bit of a clue in the word ‘maternity’. There must be a reason they’re not called ‘paternity’ units. So I’m somewhat confused about why the NHS feels:

• that there is a need for a Maternity Gender Inclusion Programme
• that this no doubt wonderful programme is a priority for the NHS’s collapsing maternity services

Nevertheless, the Maternity Gender Inclusion Programme is to be rolled out nationwide with a focus on improving maternity care for pregnant transgender patients. Of course, I don’t know how many transgenders are pregnant. I suspect it’s not that many.

No doubt thousands of hours of valuable medics’ time will be wasted in absurd seminars in which attendees will be pressured into admitting they have “unconscious bias” against transgenders or else their careers will be damaged. I imagine these seminars will also cover woke shibboleths like micro-aggressions, white fragility/privilege, critical race theory, BLM, structural racism and any other progressive, politically-correct nonsense you can think of. Maybe they’ll even blame climate change for our failing maternity services?.

It’s quite interesting watching our society tear itself apart by committing cultural and economic suicide.

As another reader commented yesterday: “The problem with the NHS is the NHS”.