3 Mistakes Perinatal Professionals Make With Gypsy & Traveller Families (Without Realising)

Most perinatal professionals I meet genuinely care. Deeply. They want to do right by every family they support.

And yet when it comes to working with Gypsy and Traveller communities, something often isn’t landing.

Not because people don’t care.But because there are gaps many of us were never trained to see.

Let’s slow this down.

1. Misreading “Non-Engagement”

Missed appointments, late booking, irregular contact.

These patterns are often read as disinterest or resistance.

But they don’t exist in a vacuum.

For many Gypsy and Traveller families, engagement with services is shaped by past experiences of being judged, misunderstood, or not feeling safe within systems. There can also be a strong instinct to protect family life and autonomy.

What can look like non-engagement is, in many cases, a form of self-protection.

And when that is misread, the response from services can unintentionally create more distance rather than less.

There is often more here than we are initially seeing.

2. Leading With Policy Instead of Relationship

In pressured systems, it is completely understandable that professionals lean on guidelines, protocols, and structure.

These matter.

But when policy leads before trust is established, care can feel impersonal or even unsafe, particularly for communities who already feel under scrutiny.

For many Gypsy and Traveller women, relationship is not an optional extra. It is the foundation.

There is also a practical layer that is often overlooked. Literacy levels within Gypsy and Traveller communities can be lower, and some women may feel embarrassed about not fully understanding written information or medical language. Rather than asking for clarification, they may nod, agree, and move through the interaction quietly.

This can lead to situations where forms are signed or care plans are agreed to without genuine understanding.

At that point, it is not informed consent.

And that has ethical implications for all of us in practice.

Without trust, and without space to safely ask questions, care can be accepted on the surface without ever truly landing.

This is not about stepping away from policy. It is about recognising that how care is offered, explained, and received matters just as much as the care itself.

3. Assuming Understanding Without Checking

A woman agrees. She doesn’t ask questions. The plan moves forward.

On paper, everything looks clear.

But understanding is not always visible.

Power dynamics, previous experiences, and confidence all shape how safe someone feels to speak openly. For some Gypsy and Traveller women, questioning a professional may not feel comfortable. Silence can be a way of navigating the interaction, not a sign of clarity.

So it is entirely possible to move forward in care without a shared understanding ever being fully established.

This is where cultural humility becomes essential, not theoretical.

What sits underneath this

These are not isolated issues.

And they are not about individual professionals getting things wrong.

They point to a wider gap between how maternity systems are designed and how some communities experience them.

That gap affects trust, communication, and ultimately outcomes.

If this is stirring something

You may recognise moments where engagement felt difficult to build, or where something in the interaction did not quite land in the way you expected.

These experiences are more common than many professionals realise, and they are rarely explored in depth within standard training.

There is a deeper layer to this work. One that moves beyond surface-level cultural competence and into something more reflective, more relational, and far more effective in practice.

That is the work I hold inside my Cultural Humility workshop for perinatal professionals, where we take time to explore these dynamics more fully and look at how care can shift in ways that genuinely build trust.

Before you go

What feels most challenging for you when supporting Gypsy and Traveller families?

Or where have you noticed something not quite landing in your practice?