Pregnant women who are obese and live in a Somerset town are being forced to travel to a Bristol hospital, as the local facility can not cope with patients of their size.
The local hospital, Western General, said that as they only had a low-risk, midwife lead birth centre they could not offer a safe delivery to mothers with a BMI greater than 34. The Western Area health trust said that women were made aware of the policy at the beginning of their pregnancies.
The policy means that pregnant women who are obese will have to travel an extra 20 miles to give birth.
A spokesperson for the trust said that the ‘foremost concern’ was for the safety of the mothers and their unborn children. He pointed out that obese mothers were at a higher risk of bleeding during labour and were more likely to need an instrumental delivery or have complications during the labou>He added that mothers who gained more than 20kg during their pregnancy were also sent to the Bristol hospital.
A Western General representative said that their hospital was not equipped to deal with complications requiring specialist equipment, as their facilities were geared towards providing a more ‘money and more simple place to give birth’.
In a recent report by the North Somerset primary health care trust, it was revealed that over the last few years the number of people who are overweight or obese in the region has skyrocketed. They estimated that 18% of the population were obese and by 2013 this would have increased by 6,000.
The director of health Max Kammerline said that the trust were aware that obesity was a particularl problem for those in deprived areas and pointed to the Weston south area as having above-average levels of obesity.