Midwifes work in stressful situations

The Institute of Employment Studies found harassment included racial and sexual abuse as well as violence.

The results are based on 97,000 questionnaires completed by staff at 99 London NHS trusts.

Some 38% of midwives said they had been harassed compared with 36% of hospital nurses, and 33% of health assistants.

This could at least partially explain their disenchantment with the wider aspects of working life. Dilys Robinson

Doctors and administrative staff experienced lower levels of harassment.

The researchers found that verbal abuse was the most common form of harassment experienced by midwives.

They were also more likely than other professional groups to experience racial abuse.

Violence against midwives was, however, less common than against other groups.

The researchers found that one in five midwives had suffered a physical assault, compared with 49% of healthcare assistants and 40% of nurses.

Problem colleagues

The researchers also found that harassment - for all health workers - was more upsetting if it was perpetrated by a colleague or a manager, rather than a member of the public.

Researcher Dilys Robinson told BBC News Online: "Healthcare workers seem to expect a degree of bad behaviour from patients, but are more shocked if this comes from the people they work with."

Ms Robinson said her work also showed that midwives experience relatively high levels of verbal and racial harassment from colleagues and managers.

"This could at least partially explain their disenchantment with the wider aspects of working life," she said.

"Midwives are less satisfied than average about a lot of aspects of their working life, in particular feeling valued and involved, training/development/career, and immediate management.

"They are also less happy with pay and benefits than nurses, and have higher stress levels."

Midwives' response

Melanie Every, of the Royal College of Midwives, said it was probably inevitable that midwives would face abuse from some women in the latter stages of labour.

She said: "Many women, especially if they have taken gas and air, or drugs, are not always even aware that they are being abusive, and midwives tend to accept it as part and parcel of the job."

However, she said abuse from relatives was a much harder problem for midwives to come to terms with.

"Many midwives are looking after more than one women at the same time, and may find themselves facing two or three groups of relatives all complaining that a woman is not getting enough care, when the midwife is already doing all that they can.

"Abusing a midwife in this situation is not acceptable, but the only real way to tackle the problem is to make more resources available so that midwives are not stretched so thinly."