The image of the midwives entering my home is as vivid today as it was nearly four years ago at the height of Covid. I remember the sound of their voices. Bright and breezy. Calm and confident. They must have been masking any fear they had following my phone call pleading for them to come straight away. I couldn’t move. I was 19 hours into my labour and refusing to go to the hospital. I had almost given up. I’d remained on all fours on the bed all that time and the pain was too great to make the drive to the birth centre. I was scared and my body had stopped doing whatever it was that it was doing.

“Thank God,” I thought, when I heard them. “They’ve arrived.” The sense of relief that I felt was immense. I took one look at them and I knew I’d be OK. Within the next hours, my son was finally born. So grateful was I for the midwives and their support, I attempted to go to the kitchen and bring them tea and cake. The umbilical cord was still attached and I’d not yet delivered my placenta.

“You’re not going anywhere,” one replied, laughing. Clearly my oxytocin levels were through the roof.

I’m not sure anyone forgets their midwives. At what can often be a woman’s most vulnerable and scariest moment, we depend on them to keep us safe, comforted and brave.

Yet too many women are rushed through our maternity wards on what some midwives refer to as a conveyor belt. I had given birth unexpectedly at home and, on the whole, I’d describe the experience as eye-opening. Empowering, even. But afterwards I discovered that colleagues and friends who had given birth in hospital had had traumatising experiences with limited aftercare. They had not felt listened to or attended to. They’d felt abandoned, stressed, coerced and rushed. They’d lost blood, got infections, become delusional. There was not one positive birth story among them. I started to look into it, and found that about 30,000 women a year develop post-traumatic stress disorder following birth. Increasingly, I wanted to know what was happening behind those hospital walls.

About a year after the birth of my son, when I began to feel a little less sleep-deprived, I began to make contact with midwives to find out more. Many were gearing up for a campaign called March With Midwives – organised to raise awareness about the impact that work conditions were having on them and the women using the services. The Royal College of Midwives had already announced a shortage in England of 2,500 midwives. A staffing and safety crisis, midwives told me, was making maternity services unsustainable, so I decided to make a documentary on the subject, using their stories.

By that point, three maternity reviews into individual trusts had taken place. After each one, midwives said they felt blamed and as if they couldn’t defend themselves. They were too scared to speak out for fear of either losing their jobs or scaring women away from coming to hospital to give birth. Essentially they felt that they had no voice. But now, some were beginning to feel as if enough was enough and, bravely, they agreed to speak with me over Zoom.

“I don’t want women and babies to be at risk any more,” said Sharon at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation trust, who had been a midwife for nearly 30 years. “What we deemed as safe when we first opened the ward was a minimum of eight staff on a day shift. Now you could end up with four.” An anonymous whistleblower at the trust also told me that some nights there could be just two midwives working instead of six.

One night I got a phone call from a distressed midwife. She told me about junior midwives being left to work alone on triage; sick midwives given Lemsip and Tic Tacs rather than being sent home, and long delays for women who had been induced. Inductions are often recommended if a baby is overdue or if there’s a risk to mother or baby’s health; they occur in almost a third of all births. “But when it comes to their induction day, they are being delayed again and again because we have half the staff we need,” the midwife explained. When the induction is delayed, the labour often does not continue, and so the level of risk increases. “One day, we will find that a baby has died because we couldn’t do things in a timely manner.”

And a year into my research, this happened at Gloucestershire Royal hospital. A woman who had been induced for medical reasons ended up waiting five days to be taken down to the delivery suite where she could give birth with the recommended one-to-one care. Essentially her labour had been put on pause as she waited for a midwife to become free and, on the fifth day, the baby’s heartbeat could no longer be found.

The trust summary of an independent investigation into the death confirmed that “staffing levels impacted the mother’s induction of labour and sufficient staffing may have changed the outcome for the baby”. The Gloucestershire Hospitals trust said it had introduced a quality-improvement project focused on induction, and that it was determined to learn and change when things go wrong.

But problems with inductions are not limited to the Gloucestershire trust. Midwives from two other UK trusts told me of similar incidents, and the Care and Quality Commission has highlighted the issue in a number of other trusts. We submitted an FOI to the NHS’s investigative branch, the Maternity and Newborn Safety Investigations Programme (MNSI, formally HSIB), and found that in the past three and a half years, it has looked into more than 200 cases where induction of labour has been one of the causes that led to either injury or death.

James Walker, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Leeds, says: “One of the problems is that the number of inductions has increased – partly because the methods of induction are easier [and partly due to] a change in policy about how long a pregnancy should go on for and what is dangerous – without anyone really sitting down to work out how best to manage this, to make sure you’ve got the right number of staff, the right facilities to do it in the ever-important timescale.” It is also questionable whether such high numbers of inductions are in fact necessary.

I cannot imagine what it must be like for a midwife to go to work wanting to bring healthy babies into the world and instead end up worrying if an avoidable baby death will happen on their watch. In the Panorama documentary I made about this issue, we hear from midwives who are told not to bother escalating issues of staffing by management. “You’re almost greeted with: ‘Well, we know the staffing is bad. What’s the point in putting in another complaint about it?’”

This culture of not being listened to is something Dr Bill Kirkup, who led major maternity reviews in Morecambe Bay and east Kent, says is present in every inquiry: “There’s a massive common ground to all of these reports. If you do a kind of word cloud of the things that you read, then the same terms do come up. And they do involve things like culture and compassion and listening.”

A Facebook group called Beyond Midwifery has more than 4,000 members – all of whom have either left the profession or are desperate to leave it. They post about being off work due to anxiety and depression. One midwife says the impact on her “mental health is too much”. Another says she has “suicidal thoughts, sitting at train stations late at night thinking about how to get out of work”. In my research, midwives have also told me about how they had turned to self-harming to cope.

In Gloucestershire, an anonymous whistleblower said her biggest fear is that it would take the death of a midwife for things to change. “That’s not even necessarily women and babies dying,” she said. “Is it going to have to get to the point where a midwife takes her own life because of how she feels about work, because of the pressure that she’s under?” The Gloucestershire trust says that, in the past three years, it has increased midwifery posts from 243 to 264 and strengthened the ways in which staff can “speak up safely”.

I became pregnant while I was making the documentary last autumn, but lost the baby at three months. It meant I found myself going through the system I was investigating. During a routine scan, an expert in early pregnancy sonography gave me the news: “I’m afraid your baby is not compatible with life.”

I felt shocked and heartbroken at the same time. My work on the documentary meant I was all too aware of what was likely going on behind the scenes. I was experiencing a constant adrenaline rush and found it difficult to take it all in. I turned once again to the midwife present to help me navigate the process physically and emotionally – and, through tears, found myself apologising to her for clogging up the system. “I’m sorry I’m taking up so much of your time,” I told her. “I know how busy you are and what you’re dealing with.”

The Maternal Fetal Assessment Unit, where I ended up, does, by nature, have a different pace to delivery or antenatal wards. The midwives there are dealing with miscarriages and pregnancy concerns, not babies on the way. But I was grateful for her calm demeanour and comforting manner, despite her workload. “Don’t be silly,” she replied, before leaving to continue training up the newly qualified midwife who was shadowing her.

Midwives tend to put on a brave face. They will always want to be the strength when we don’t have it in us. But they are desperate for help – and we need to start listening.

Panorama: Midwives Under Pressure is available to watch now on BBC iPlayer.