Delivering baby with NHS. What’s your experience?

12 comments

1. Got a 3 month old son born in June, delivered in Birmingham Women’s Hospital via NHS and got nothing but excellent stuff to say about that place. Everything went smoothly and pre and post birth care was great too.

2. I don’t have personal experience, but I saw a thread about this a couple months back randomly and someone linked a mini series from the BBC called “This is going to hurt” and it had a thousand ‘doctors’ commenting under it saying how realistic the show was.

   I watched it and it was something, very interesting watch.

   Anyway an NHS doctor goes to work in a private clinic covering someone else and he has to deliver a baby, it all goes wrong because the private hospital was understaffed and underprepared and if the NHS doctor wasn’t there the baby and mother would have died. He meets one of his ‘friends’ who isn’t a friend and tells her as bad as the NHS looks, don’t go private for a baby. They’re good for general admissions, not something that can quickly turn to trauma, like a pregnancy.

   Delivering a baby is not something the NHS is going to drag their feet on, like a non emergency dermatology appointment. When you see people complaining about the NHS, it’s because they’re dealing with non life threatening issues usually so obviously they’re not getting top priority care. If you get by a car and get a hospital, the NHS will be the only thing that can help.

   Don’t watch it if you’re squeemish in any form, I’m a gay guy who loves horror and shows like Saw, but this series was saw on steroids. Wait till you’ve had your baby then watch it lol

3. Was excellent.

4. I work with newborn babies and their parents. With well over 500 babies, we have only heard one proper complaint about the hospital/staff.

   There’s the odd ‘it took a while to be discharged because they were busy’ – but feedback we hear is overwhelmingly positive for the 2 hospitals and 1 birthing centre that are in our area.

   I guess this could vary regionally though.

5. I posted this elsewhere but it still stands.

   NHS was great and we found homebirths better than hospital births (note they won’t let you have a home birth if there it’s a higher risk pregnancy)

   3 kids

   No 1 was a home birth. Took a while pushing but the Midwives were great. Very chilled after the baby was born and within about 2 hours of birth we were left alone, baby feeding and wife abe to sleep in our bed.

   No 2 also a home birth. As above, but even slicker. I was able to cut the cord and was very much part of the event.

   No 3 was hospital because COVID limited home births. Wife was in at about 7pm, I was called in at about 11pm. Born just after midnight and not that dissimilar to being at home. I was sent away about 30 mins after the birth though. My wife then said aftercare was ‘ok’ but the getting any sort of rest was incredibly hard. She self-discharged about 11am the same day.

   So in our experience, NHS home births were amazing. The hospital one wasn’t as good but COVID clearly played a part

6. There are stories about people’s experiences on subs like r/beyondthebumpUK and r/pregnancyUK if you’d like people’s in-depth experiences.

   I gave birth last month at our local NHS hospital. The experience was excellent, especially as originally I had wanted to give birth in a midwifery led unit (but went over my due date so had to be induced).

   They listened and made sure they had informed consent for everything, including giving me syntocin and an epidural – both of which I had in my notes as a “no”, but changed my mind on during delivery due to how things were progressing. I asked for the epidural and they double checked several times that I was okay changing my mind while we waited for the anaesthesiologist.

   I had my own dedicated midwife, which was a lovely surprise, who led everything.

   I was in a ward afterwards, which wasn’t ideal, but had curtains to partition off my bed. It was also kind of nice as it meant I could talk to the other new Mums when I didn’t have visitors.

   Sometimes things can be slow – discharge or waiting for an elective c-section – but that’s just because they’re so busy. it was a genuinely positive experience from induction to discharge.

7. Absolutely brilliant, despite the clear and obvious amount of pressure the staff were under.

8. From start to finish it was embarrassingly bad. Imagine Basil Fawlty was in charge.

9. Son was born December 2022. Absolutely brilliant service. We called up beforehand as my wife spotted some blood. They told us to come in but it was likely nothing. 30 minutes later were in a bed on an open ward. They run some checks and turns out the boy is very close to wanting out. Hour after arriving were in a bigger ward with rooms. We ended up with 2 rooms. One with a birthing pool and a standard room with bed. So we where running back and forth at my wife’s request.

   Never went more than 5 minutes without the widwives popping in. They kept me (dad) full of toast, tea and biscuits. They where excellent with my wife throughout the whole process and made sure she was as comfortable as you can be giving birth. They encouraged her and praised her throughout and where just genuinely all lovely. Except for one junior midwife or whatever they’re called. She was just abit nervous and splashed me with dirty water taking gloves off. Total accident and she was nice otherwise.

   So baby arrives. Were fed even more toast etc and then we’re all taken into a separate room so they could put my wife’s bits back where they should be (tier 2 tear or something). They cleaned the room whilst we where in there before we returned.

   One of the midwives went through a bunch of stuff with me such as actually dressing the baby, swaddling etc. All seems easy but when it comes to it I had zero experience ha

   We luckily left the same day baby was born after numerous checks on baby and wife. Had a midwife visit the next morning as they couldn’t do all of the checks due to staffing levels but knew he was healthy and safe to send home already.

   Overall a really great experience. Much better than I expected. We always had someone at hand to help if needed. They looked after me which they didn’t really need to do. I was just there to help look after wife after all. Midwives can do great toast. Need to work on their tea.

10. Fucking amazing for my two.

    > but feeling nervous/anxious about the state of NHS

    What does this blanket statement even mean? Stop reading the news. One thing the NHS does very fucking well is babies and everything to do with babies.

11. I personally did not have a great experience. The midwives I had did not keep me in the loop as to what was happening so I felt VERY out of control. One was a student so there was a lot of checking on me and then whispering in the corner which I hated and asked them several what they were saying, only to be brushed off.

    The after care also was not great again with such little communication. The staff in the ward were rude and didn’t seem to want to be of any help. I asked what I was supposed to do with me 3 hour old baby as I needed the loo and their reply was ‘well we aren’t babysitters!’ (Bearing in mind there were only 2 mums on the entire floor!) So I ended up using the loo with the door wide open and my baby parked outside. It was the middle of the night at that point so my husband had gone home for some rest and I was not comfortable leaving my baby unattended.

    The entire experience is one of my 1000 reasons why I won’t have any more kids.

12. It usually comes out