Making a Formal Complaint after a Difficult Hospital Birth Experience
If you experienced difficulties with your care at a hospital during labor or your postpartum stay, we first want to say we’re so sorry.
You deserved better. Your family deserved better. You are not crazy for feeling the way you feel (whether that’s grief, numbness, rage, sadness, or anything else).
Your feelings are valid, and you are not alone. According to one study, up to 45% of people describe their birth experience as traumatic.
Next, we want to share that there are things you can do to report your experience if you choose.
This process can feel daunting when also taking care of a newborn and not getting much sleep. We hope this resource can make it a little easier to understand your options if you want to report your experience.
Why report your experience?
A now-defunct nonprofit organization called Improving Birth put it beautifully:
Why complain?
Simply put, there is no reason for anything to change unless families are putting pressure on the system to change. For many years now, parents have not been complaining about what happened to them and their babies in childbirth. We believe it’s time to break the silence and break the cycle.
For some people, pursuing complaints and receiving an apology or helping to implement a hospital policy change is part of their own healing processes. Parents have reported relief and a feeling of empowerment in speaking out about their treatment.
What “counts” as something you can make an official complaint about?
Anything care providers and hospital staff said, did, or didn’t do that made you feel unheard, disrespected, invalidated, coerced, ignored, neglected, abused, violated, shamed, blamed, unsafe, etc.
This applies to care and treatment of both you and your baby both during labor and your postpartum stay.
If you want to learn more about human and legal rights in childbirth, we highly recommend Birth Monopoly’s Know Your Rights course created by lawyer and birth rights advocate Cristen Pascucci. This course is an amazing resource for consumers, doulas, and birth advocates to learn about the complicated (and not so complicated) aspects around the rights someone has when they are pregnant and giving birth.
Sometimes the aspects of a parents’ hospital experience that they’re upset about directly and obviously violated their rights. Other times, it’s less clear. Either way, submitting a complaint is completely valid if you’re unhappy with the care you received.
A note: It’s common for parents to have thoughts like, “Well, my story isn’t that bad,” or “I’m sure other people have had it worse.” We encourage you to consider reporting your experience even if you feel that it could have been worse. Change towards more respectful perinatal care won’t happen if hospitals and health care providers don’t hear from consumers who are unsatisfied with their experiences, even if they weren’t worst case scenarios (which hospitals and providers should definitely hear about).
So what can you do if you experienced less-than-ideal (or worse) treatment at a hospital when you gave birth?
You have several options:
Write a letter directly to the care provider in question, and/or to key administrators at the hospital about your experience. This can be done via mail or email.
To help you get started:
Tracey Vogel created a template (scroll to the bottom of the page), and offers assistance for people who want support filing a complaint. She is an OB anesthesiologist who works with people who have a history of birth trauma.
This form from an experienced doula in Los Angeles may also give you some ideas. It is more focused on birth-friendly hospital policies.
If your concern revolved around a specific medical care provider (negligence, abuse, coercion, medical mistakes, etc.) you can report your experience to a licensing board:
File a complaint against a PA licensed professional like a doctor, certified nurse midwife, nurse, etc.
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for a board-certified OB/GYN
Report to other entities overseeing hospitals and healthcare providers, including any organization who has accredited that hospital. Some ideas:
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Healthcare Facility Complaint Form
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights
The Informed Patient Institute has some additional information you may find helpful
You can also spread the word about your experience if you want to
Write public reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Healthgrades, or RateMDs page for the hospital and/or care providers involved. You can create a new email account if you want to remain anonymous.
Add your story to Birth Monopoly’s obstetric violence map
Share your story with your local birth community. If you worked with a doula, childbirth educator outside of the hospital setting, or other member of the local birth community, you can write to them and share your experience.
It’s important to many birth professionals, ourselves included, to hear these kinds of stories (especially if they concern a hospital and/or provider that is often recommended). That way, we have more context when talking with other families about their options for where to give birth and how to find a safe and supportive care provider.
Share your story with your friends, family, and social network. Sometimes social media can be a very helpful way to get the word out about mistreatment in a hospital.
You may even consider taking legal action against the hospital and/or specific care providers involved in your experience.
You can consult with birth rights lawyers like Cristen Pascucci or Hermine Hayes-Klein if this is a path you want to investigate further.
As you navigate this decision-making process, you may find the latter portion of this resource helpful: Birth Rights (PDF download) by the Birth Rights Bar Association.
What happens when someone reports their negative experience directly to a hospital?
Unfortunately, it’s very possible nothing will happen.
Hospitals aren’t legally obligated to respond to letters like this. If you really want a response, you may need to be proactive about following up in the weeks after contacting the hospital.
Someone from the hospital may reach out to acknowledge your complaint, maybe offering a phone call or meeting to discuss your concerns. Whether or not parents feel comfortable having these direct conversations is a very personal decision. Caring for a baby can be a very taxing, vulnerable time of life (especially after a difficult or traumatic birth or postpartum experience), and not everyone feels up for having these types of conversations in the newborn period. And that’s ok.
Some parents like to ask if they can get back in touch at a later date when they feel more able to communicate their thoughts directly in person.
Most importantly, if you experienced a difficult or traumatic birth/postpartum stay in a hospital, we encourage you to prioritize your well-being.
Sometimes people find that communicating with agencies or hospital staff and reliving their story can be very triggering.
We always encourage our clients to put their own health and well-being first before advocacy work that might help to bring change for other families. There are many mental health practitioners in the Pittsburgh area specializing in perinatal mental health.
As we mentioned above, sometimes parents feel guilty about putting off reporting their experience while they are in the trenches of life with a newborn. If that’s you, please try to let yourself off the hook! Early parenthood can be demanding, overwhelming, and just plain hard. You can always come back to the reporting process at a later time if you aren’t feeling up for it, if it’s too painful to think about at the moment, or if you just don’t have the time to devote to that process right now.
We have additional birth trauma support options on our resources page.
In case you want some recommendations for ways to nourish yourself after a difficult or traumatic birth, here are some of our go-to suggestions:
Figure out who in your life is safe to talk to. Telling the story of a difficult or traumatic birth can be met with varying reactions from friends and family (not all positive), so try to suss out the validating listeners in your life.
It may help to develop a phrase that’s easy to use if you’re asked about your experience when you don’t want to share about it. Consider something like, “It was really intense, and I don’t really want to go into the details.”
A birth story listening session. This is a gentle, guided, non-clinical session with a compassionate birth worker to help parents begin to find healing after a challenging birth and/or postpartum experience. Many parents find that a birth story session is a helpful addition to other therapies they may be using (it’s not a replacement for therapy, medication, or working with a clinical professional). We highly recommend working with Virginia Bobro or Tracy Vogel.
Therapy. If you don’t already have an established relationship with a therapist, this could be a helpful time to find someone. You can use websites like Psychology Today to find a therapist near you, or feel free to reach out to us for some recommendations if you’re local to Western PA. If you are dealing with the effects of trauma after this experience, you might consider looking for someone who practices EMDR.
Note: Not all therapists are skilled in dealing with situations revolving around pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood. It may take a few tries to find someone who is a good fit for addressing whatever it is you feel you need to work on as a new parent who went through a difficult birth experience.
Consider working with a lactation professional and/or postpartum doula who is trauma-informed. Not all postpartum doulas and lactation consultants are well-versed in working with families who’ve had difficult birth experiences, so be sure to choose someone who feels really safe for you.
Try to minimize chores and household obligations (unless they are helpful in your own process of recovery and healing). Take your friends, families, neighbors, coworkers, etc. seriously if they offer to help. Sometimes having someone else take care of a meal, some laundry, a little cleaning, taking older kids out of the house for a while, or giving your pets some special attention can give you some space and time for rest, healing, bonding with your little one, and just plain time to think.
If you want to report your experience and you want a little help or support, reach out to us.
We’re happy to point you in the right direction if you have questions about reporting your experience in Pittsburgh. Long-term change in the state of perinatal care is very slow, but each time a parent/consumer reports a bad experience, we get a little closer to improving care for more parents and babies.
If you want our help reading over a letter you wrote, helping you to figure out who to send your letter to, or if you have questions about anything we’ve listed here, send us a note. If we can’t help you, we’ll try to connect you with resources that will be able to assist.
Finally, thank you.
Filing complaints, reports, and grievances can be emotionally challenging and time-consuming. Thank you for taking this step to help address your own healing process, and to help improve care for other parents and babies in your community.
