Julie's Boggle

There are several options for antenatal classes in our borough. For us, the easiest (if you don’t count the slightly awkward hours and the long waiting list), was the one held by the National Health Service (NHS) at the hospital we’re going to. [An added bonus is that they're also free.]

So over the last two Thursday evenings, 5 — 8pm, we covered both of the three-hour sessions for new parents as well as a tour of the delivery floors.

The first session was particularly good. Delivered by a charismatic midwife with the doubtful name of ‘Iffy’, it covered all sorts of practical information up to and including the birth itself. Overall she did make giving birth sound like quite a positive experience (and she had live videos to show us!), but that didn’t stop odd snippets from lodging in my mind including little gems like “painful” and “lots of blood”. Ho-hum.

The hospital tour followed the first session. First off was the “Delivery Suite” which has 12 attractive en-suite rooms (all medical equipment hidden away inside pretty oak cupboards), some of which even come with a bed for Dad to use overnight before they send the entire family home the next day.

If all goes well, the midwives run the show in the Delivery Suite. If not, the doctors are all on the same floor (so are the operating theatres and “high-risk” rooms) and very accessible if required. If you were having an epidural for example, this is where you’d go.

Then for even less complicated births, we were taken for a look at the recently added Birth Centre unit which is exclusively led by the midwives. (Any problems, and there’s a dedicated lift to the Delivery Suite upstairs.) The en-suite rooms there, complete with a bed for Mom and Dad, were even more cosy and home-like — although the birthing balls, hammocks and beanbags might look a little out of place in the average bedroom.

Overall we were both very impressed by the delivery options. It all looks like it’s been carefully thought out and designed for purpose, and it’s greatly reassuring to know that our closest hospital — where they deliver 5000 babies a year! — is so well organised.

The second session last week went a little more slowly :yawn:, but it did cover the all-important breathing (by a sweet, but much less charismatic, physiotherapist) and then another midwife took over to pass on a whole swathe of info regarding post-natal care both at the hospital (generally minimal) and later at home.

So I guess you could say we’re all trained up now (just the final “breast-feeding workshop” session for me to go to in a month’s time) and about 7 weeks to go until we get to put it all into practice! Whee!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Pregnancy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.