Midwife shares honest scrubs photo to show difficulties of job: 'No time to change sanitary products'

Petra Vinberg Linder posts image to show what a strenuous job being a midwife in Sweden is

Ms Linder initially just shared the photo with her friends but eventually succumbed to numerous requests to make it public (Facebook / Petra Vinberg Linder)

An image of a Swedish midwife’s scrubs drenched in blood after a hectic night shift at a Stockholm hospital has gone viral.

Petra Vinberg Linder shared a photo of her crotch-stained work clothes to demonstrate her job can be so busy she has no time to even change her sanitary products.

"Night shift midwife = had three childbirths. You don't have time to pee or change sanitary products. Thanks and goodnight," she said.

Ms Linder initially just shared the photo with her friends but eventually succumbed to requests to make it public. Before long, the image was picked up by a number of Sweden’s leading publications and elsewhere in Scandinavia.

She said she shared the image to show people what a strenuous job being a midwife in Sweden is. She said in her hospital each midwife has an average of two deliveries to help with at any given time and the working conditions are leaving people exhausted and burnt out.

She said many people in Sweden were keen to work in midwifery but chose not to because of the frenetic nature of the work.

"I shared it with my private friends on Facebook, went home and went to sleep, then when I woke up I saw people had asked me to make it public. So I did, then it became a big thing, but that wasn’t the original idea," she told The Local.

"It's a very difficult field of work. I love my job, I chose it and I want to work in this field, but I wonder after a night like this how many years I'll manage. I'm 40, I'll work to 65 if I'm fit, but can you manage that? There are so many people in this country who want to work with childbirth, but don't because of the working conditions”.

"Though I've only worked as a midwife for a week, before that I was an assistant nurse here for many years and it was always high pressure. But it has escalated. It's just getting worse and there has to have a change. We need another clinic in Stockholm, and there's a problem in the countryside too, where they closed the maternity ward in Sollefteå."

Her colleague Hannah Dahlbäck shared an image of her own to social media in order to demonstrate the fact hardly any places were available at maternity wards in Stockholm, Uppsala, Västerås, Nyköping and Eskilstuna on Friday night.

Ms Linder’s observations arguably mirror the situation in the UK. It was recently found the number of nurses and midwives leaving the profession has risen 51 per cent in the space of just four years, with those under the age of retirement citing low pay and poor working conditions.

At the beginning of July, new figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) showed that for the first time in recent history more midwives and nurses are bidding farewell to the register than are joining, with homegrown UK nurses leaving in the largest numbers.

Between 2016 and 2017, 20 per cent more people left the register than joined it, and among those first registered in the UK, the figure was 45 per cent.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) urged the Government to axe the pay cap as a matter of urgency to curtail the number of people leaving the profession.