In case someone comes to this thread for an update: I gave birth at RSCH in June 2019.
The staff members, from Orderly to Consultant, were brilliant. Birthing suites great.
The rest of the facilities are TERRIBLE.
The car park is overfull, cramped and expensive. The lifts in the car park were broken when we were there.
The construction works made it hard to get into the hospital from the car park. The designated pathway and signs disappeared midway to the tower.
At the tower, we apparently took the “wrong” lifts to floor 12. We arrived in a dark corridor.
I had to be admitted to be induced and stayed overnight because I had to wait until 23:30 to see a consultant about going home to labour (arrived at 9:30).
Antenatal ward was much more spacious than the postnatal ward. There was room for a chair by the bed, a cupboard, a table and room to walk around the bed without touching the privacy curtain when it was closed. But the button on the toilet was broken, the light in the toilet took ages to turn on, and the whole place was dingy. They manually broke my waters with only the flimsiest pad beneath me, and no one ever changed the bed so I couldn’t lie down before I left to go to the birthing suite a couple hours later.
I was trying to bring on labour so was walking, and there was nowhere to go but up and down the stairs. At the top of the stairs, maybe around floor 16, there were construction works, it wasn’t cordoned off, and bits of plastic and cables were hanging over the stairs. It looked dangerous.
The birth suite itself was great. Clean, bright, nice. I had an emergency c section and it was calm, cheerful and low stress. I felt very well taken care of.
In the immediate recovery area, my mum was able to join my husband and baby and me, and a midwife helped me to breastfeed, and later to collect colostrum.
The postnatal ward was horrific. It was absolutely tiny. There wasn’t room to walk around the bed without touching the privacy curtain. This meant my poor husband couldn’t get up to care for the baby without knocking the bed. So I was constantly being woken up from the little sleep I could get, and I started hallucinating that I was in a rowboat at sea trying to sleep.
No cabinet to put stuff in, which actually matters because you bring a bunch of stuff with you and it just has to sit out in the tiny space available, tripping people up.
The bed was not fit for purpose for someone who had just had major abdominal surgery. The call button was not in reach, and there was nowhere it could be clipped to the bed to keep it in reach. There were no monkey bars to pull myself up to save my abdominal muscles. There is no way a mother who had a c section could care for her baby if she did not have a support person there. The midwives on duty were all great, but there was one per 8 people. Not enough.
You could hear everything in the other beds of course, babies crying in the night, etc.
It wasn’t clean either. There was a container of bloody urine in the toilet for ages, and blood on surfaces in the toilet.
I stayed one night after the birth (I had my baby at 21:00) and left before 15:00 the next day. I rushed out because it was terrible in there. Less than 24 hours post surgery, I walked (why do they show mothers in wheelchairs in movies?) very gingerly the long, long way to the car park and was relieved to leave.
Again, great staff. Terrible facilities.
Lucky the baby is fab!
For this birth, I’m trying Princess Royal.