Our 'interesting' call of last night was a maternataxi. What, I hear you ask could be interesting about taking a pregnant woman 1.2 miles into the local maternity department.

Well, apart from the patient, no-one else knew that she was pregnant - she had been hiding the pregnancy from everyone. She hadn't seen a doctor, nor had she booked into a maternity department. Her family suspected nothing. It's not as if she were a 'large' woman, who could perhaps hide the tell-tale bump under the pretense of fat. She was actually rather slender, which leads me to ask how she could hide her rather obvious pregnancy from everyone.

When my crewmate spoke to her (I was driving), she told him that she had hoped that the pregnancy would 'go away'.

We tried to prewarn the maternity department that we were coming (because, she was quite close to actually delivering the baby), but they hung up the phone twice on our Control. The problem is that the entrance to the maternity department is locked at night - and we need someone to come down and open it for us. So - we were left standing around outside the department waiting for the midwives to phone for a porter to traipse the length of the hospital to come and open the door for us (as opposed to one of the midwives walking down the stairs and opening the door).

By the time we got in the patient was starting to bleed, and we were getting more irate at the apparent ignorance of the midwives.

So tonight we are going to put in a 'clinical incident report' to highlight the danger that standing outside the maternity department for 10 minutes while they arrange a porter puts the patient in.

One of the people on complex has had to deliver a baby in the back of their ambulance while they were waiting for the doors to be opened, so something needs to be done.