Home water birth – did you rent or buy the kit, any tips?

Because…?

Because a midwife is better trained/skilled at delivering babies than a nurse.

However, that is all they good at, my wife would give a midwife a punch if they proclaimed to have half the skills of a doctor.

In essence a midwife is fantastic if a delivery is going normally. If things go wrong, quite rightly a doctor takes over.

You’d rather a jnr Dr on the ward for 2 months over a midwife with 20 yrs experience. I’ll inform Mrs B when she’s home.
Just who tells these know it all Dr’s what to do when things go wrong. Majority of Dr’s on the wards are jnr Dr’s full of text book knowledge but no real idea.

2 staff at home birth not indulgent? Mrs B and another midwife looking after 17 women on ward last night not all labouring granted. Having 2 at your home is indulgent IMHO so you can have your utopian home birth.

100% fine home water birth with our little one here. My partner trained as a miidwife and now teaches hypnobirthing, promotes home birth and sells home birth products online so was fully aware of the benefits and potential issues that could arise, and put at ease in my mind the typical questions being put up here, like “why, surely in hospital its safer?!” (No, not necessarily).

We hired a private midwife as well which was not cheap but worth it as she was there the whole time, listened to what my partner wanted and only needed to give a little assistance right at the end. She even cleaned up afterwards whilst we spent those precious first few hours chilling out with the new arrival.

My wife laid an egg!

No, not a headline from the Sunday Sport, but something that really happened. This comes under the general heading of advice to expecting parents (rather than anything to do with the home birth argument) and is something that is rarely explained at ante-natal classes.

Babies don’t always come out as babies, they can sometimes be delivered still in the placenta ‘born in the caul’ as they say, essentially the mother lays an egg!! This can come as a bit of a shock to the poor old father (too bl**dy right). Nothing to be worried about (the midwife cuts open the placenta to magically reveal the baby) but it can be rather worrying if you haven’t been told beforehand 😯 (midwives – why isn’t this mentioned in ante natal classes??)

Every day is a school day 😀

Natrix – Surely not the placenta but the membranes?

Good to hear more positives than before. We’ve decided to buy a pool and hopefully use it for no 2 or sell it on.

They come with, and you can buy, liners for them to keep them clean and hygienic – I doubt you’d need a hazmat suit… though you might….

Our first daughter’s heart rate dropped through the floor midway through what had been a pretty routine delivery. Trapped umbilical cord. They pushed the Big Red Button and the missus was getting sliced open in theatre within what felt like a few minutes.

Pretty glad I didn’t have to attempt that myself at home with a rusty Stanley knife and a Haynes manual. So for that reason am oot.

But each to their own. Best of luck to all of you.

Have you considered the paddling pool at your local leisure centre?
It’s heated and only a couple of quid entry.
Win win.

Is it worth getting shirty over a professional title…? My wife’s a nurse but wouldn’t give a monkeys if one of the patients or one of their family members mistook her for a healthcare assistant. It’s all about giving good care regardless of the title surely…?

Just to pitch up with a positive view, we’ve had 3 kids, last 2 were at home with a (bought) water bath.

As per others we had 2 midwives for the actual birth, the bath took ages to fill but was a god send for pain (apparently!) and the whole process was wonderful.

1st time around we were 5 mins from the obs unit, 2nd time we were further but were more confident.

It’s a very special feeling for your kids to wake up in the morning and find they have a new brother or sister in the house.

We bought a bath as we thought it would get more than one use – I cleaned up and it wasn’t that bad really!

Since then it’s been in the loft!

Does no one sell an aftermarket kit for converting an old birthing pool into a hot tub?

Seems like a missed opportunity 😀

geoffj – its the hospital that decide how many staff are present at home births so having two is hardly indulgence is it. Very odd thing to say. It may well be due to hours worked as the first was there on her own for 2-3 hours having been called out at 3am. Damn site cheaper for the NHS as well and gives the mother better rest than being on a maternity ward.

Well lets hang on a little bit here. It matters not who decides how many midwives are present. Having 2 midwives at your house for the duration of the sharp end of labour means that they are not attending to others. When our second came along, the midwife was popping in and checking on her (at the sharp end of labour) every couple of minutes or so whilst also checking in on other soon to be mothers in the delivery suite. They can’t do that if they are eating you out of biscuits at your house. You do the math(s).

Damn site cheaper for the NHS

Maybe, if suitable facilities didn’t already exist, but this always going to be an additional cost until all babies are born at home.

Natrix – Surely not the placenta but the membranes?

You are correct, not the placenta, it was the amniotic sac.

bruneep / geoffj

If you had actually read my first post you would have noted the bit where we were encouraged to have a home birth by the midwife. The fact that we had two for a couple of hours as they crossed over what I assumed to be shift patterns is hardly our fault. It was (we were told) the policy at our NHS trust to encourage home births as only 3-4% were currently delivered that way. Now we all (mostly I think) respect NHS staff and would prefer that they had a greater say in budgetary matters than pen pushing administrators. If those staff then decide that two midwives should be present rather than just one then I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to think I know better than them. We had the 2 midwives between 17 women experience the first time, the quality of care was patchy at best and if another woman had gone into labour at the same time as my OH I dare say I would have ended up at the business end with a pair of goalkeeping gloves! Just because we exercised an option that was available to us doesn’t make it indulgent or indeed Utopian! Go back to your Daily Mail.

cb

I’m not accusing you of being indulgent. My point about the economics of having midwives attending home births vs covering more births in a labour suite still stands irrespective of who decides how resources are allocated. In the current financial climate within the nhs it’s hard to understand how these kinds of decisions can be justified.

Like I say, indulgent IMHO.

And just because I take a different view from you doesn’t mean I read the Daily Mail.

geoffj – fair enough on the Daily Mail – that was more aimed at bruneep who seems to think that having an alternative view on the world to him makes me a hippy!

The use of the word indulgent still shows naivety IMHO. If the maternity ward was rammed and there was a shortage of midwives, there is no way that they would have sent them out to a home birth. Instead we would have been told to get our arses down to the hospital. So in summary, we got a better experience, the midwives ate biscuits and we still disagree!

Looking up the word ‘indulgent’ in the thesaurus show alternatives such as lenient, tolerant, generous, non-judgemental and understanding. There’s a bit of irony for you.

EDIT – it was also 6 years ago so perhaps the economics thing hadn’t hit home at the time…

My other half is a midwife and may have some informative views on this.. I’ll ask her when she gets in..

From a personal viewpoint though, we weren’t interested in having our kids born into a lukewarm pool of grot..
It seems like a really romantic idea, until you consider the mind boggling amount of blood, faeces, amniotic fluid and other gore that accompanies a birth.. It’s a grim soup for mother and newborn child whatever way you look at it..

What Geoff says +1

CBA with this now, my last words and mrs B reaction to this, how many midwives would we need to allow say 80-90% home births? 1000’s more across UK who will pay for that?

This midwife that encouraged you to have at home was she a community midwife, with no real grasp of what the wards are like?

Yes having 2 at your home is indulgent and utopian IMHO as it takes staff away from those in hospital. My wife can go constantly a whole shift without breaks as the are so short on the wards, to take more away from there to sit in people’s homes suppin tea and eating biscuits doesn’t make sense to me. But I’m sure your NHS trust must has have it covered with extra midwives so that everyone can have 2:1 care.

Reaction to this was

😀

Having read a few posts on here my first bit of advice is take it with a pinch of salt. We have done water births with all 3 of our kids, all at home. Even the first for those who are in shock and awe!

It is the best thing you will ever do, is not dangerous, and does not put your baby at any risk whatsoever. It does in fact give you a much better chance of having no intervention and the baby and mother the best start in life.

For the record, for our second we had to be transferred into hospital as there were some complications with an arm not in the right position and then he flipped back to back and the Mrs was getting tired. For the record, it was the most relaxed time, no rush and we got into hospital just fine and she delivered 1hr later with a little help!

Oh, and as for kit, hire it – seriously don’t want to be bothering with cleaning that crap up and storing it afterwards!

I’m not accusing you of being indulgent. My point about the economics of having midwives attending home births vs covering more births in a labour suite still stands irrespective of who decides how resources are allocated. In the current financial climate within the nhs it’s hard to understand how these kinds of decisions can be justified.

We spoke to midwifes about this and the research shows that it costs way way less to have additional midwifes to cover homebirths than it does to process a mother and baby through a hospital – the various rooms, usually doctors, usually more expensive pain meds etc etc far out way the additional outlay of having more midwifes.

We spoke to midwifes about this and the research shows that it costs way way less to have additional midwifes to cover homebirths than it does to process a mother and baby through a hospital – the various rooms, usually doctors, usually more expensive pain meds etc etc far out way the additional outlay of having more midwifes.

I’m really not sure about this; you have to remember that (even though the intervention rate is higher for hospital births) the majority of hospital births have little input from obstetric medical staff, and for uncomplicated hospital births one midwife can look after multiple mothers at the same time (unless epidurals etc enter into the equation in which case it’s 1:1). And the pain meds are all many years off patent and very cheap.

I suspect any cost ‘savings’ are based on said mother and child not clogging up a hospital bed after the birth, rather than costs at the actual moment of head popping out.

The only tip the midwife gave us if we were considering a water birth (we didn’t as it happened, thankfully similar sorry to others as intervention was required) was if you’re going to ‘pop’ into the tank with her then keep your trunks on.

Apparently one guy got a bit carried away with the moment and removed a few too many garments and realised afterwards he was standing slightly awkwardly in a water pool with nowt on…

Waiting rooms, delivery rooms, recovery rooms, all carry a huge overhead rate. If you had everyone who did a home birth stop and go to hospital you would have to build bigger hospitals.

Even if obstetrics, anaesthtists, paedaetricians (pls excuse spelling off all thouse) etc aren’t always required, they still have to have a certain number of those skills to cover the patients in the hospital.

Take into account that you are something like 4 times more likely to have a C-section if you have a hospital birth rather than a home birth the costs start to really escalate.

I suspect any cost ‘savings’ are based on said mother and child not clogging up a hospital bed after the birth, rather than costs at the actual moment of head popping out.

That may well be true; the ‘hotel’ costs of keeping someone in hospital are quite steep, even before you actually do anything with the patient. IIRC a C-section means a minimum of two nights in; however some places will discharge an uncomplicated delivery at 4h.

Even if obstetrics, anaesthtists, paedaetricians (pls excuse spelling off all thouse) etc aren’t always required, they still have to have a certain number of those skills to cover the patients in the hospital.

They’re still required often enough, and don’t imagine that anaesthetics and paeds are solely there to cover Labour Ward – they will have plenty of other stuff to keep them occupied.