MNHQ here: have you got strong feelings and personal experience about partners staying overnight on postnatal wards?

We will have to agree to disagree BertrandRussell

But also why should the father have to miss out on the first precious hours of their child's life?

Because women's needs are more important than men's wants.

In an ideal world everyone would have a private room. Until that day comes- a woman's need for privacy and dignity and to not have to bump into a strange man in the loo at 2 in the morning trumps a man's need for precious moments.

But also why should the father have to miss out on the first precious hours of their child's life?

Maybe it's the hospitals that should be thinking about how they provide more privacy instead of forcing partners out.

I have no objection in a private room, but on a shared ward it is awful.

Even during the day, I was bleeding massively, kept leaking everywhere, trying to go for a shower etc and surrounded by other peoples family. Not even just the partners, I just wanted a bit of privacy to clean myself up, every time I had to go to the bathroom covered in bloody bits in front of strangers.

Also - I have 3 kids and while my Mum and Dad were great, when no 2 and 3 were born, Dh wouldn't have stayed, he went home to be there for the older ones, who were little and feeling insecure.

victoriamcdade you do sound condescending.

I have a severe anxiety disorder which was at it's worse when my son was born so I was on the verge of a panic attack after being whisked away from my new baby and DH to be stitched up after haemorrhaging so they put me in a private room and DH stayed with me for the entire 3 days I was there.
I would not have coped without him, I just wouldn't have.
I think hospitals have to bear in mind the other issues new mums might have like this.
Dads on wards, maybe during the day sort of 7 - 7 but possibly not at night.

Reading all these points of view, I can fully understand why mothers who have just given birth would feel very vulnerable and prefer partners not to stay on wards. If my wife had been in an open ward I think I would have felt very awkward/intrusive if I stayed.

After the birth of our first, my wife was in a private room and I was still asked to leave once all had settled down for the night. I hated to go, but in retrospect I'm glad I did as the few hours' sleep I got at home were precious! My wife spent the whole night awake, watching over the baby.

After the birth of our second, in a wonderful midwife-led unit, we were lucky enough to be given an enormous en-suite room with a double bed for the night. My wife slept pretty well (though obviously interrupted by feeds). Obviously this was largely due to having past experience of parenthood, but I did wonder if my being there helped her to feel more secure.

Our local hospital has private rooms - DH stayed twice, once when I was in bits after a crash section (DS in NICU), the second time was DS' first night out of NICU, with us. I was in for a week in total. I didn't feel any need for him to stay the other nights, but I am older, probably more independent and certainly grumpier than the average mum on here. The midwives were reasonably responsive to the buzzer and only one was a total cow.

I think it is totally unacceptable for men to stay UNLESS it is in a private room. During an admission on a surgical ward for something non-maternity related, I had a morphine pump torn out of my arm by a passing junkie. I think security is already piss-poor in hospitals and admitting any old random men on demand is asking for trouble, not to mention totally inconsiderate of other women's care and privacy.

Sorry Assassinated i was looking at this thing i wrote;

"In the hospital I'm at it is standard that partners can stay overnight and I actually thought this was NHS guidelines and available in most hospitals? I'm obviously wrong about that."

It was to a different poster, apologies.

I see what you mean - it certainly does seem to be the case anecdotally that lots of women rely on their partners to get the basics - I certainly would not have had food if OH hadn't been there to get it.

I still think there are benefits to having partners there even if care was improved though. I dream of the hotel style Carr mentioned on a previous thread. Even a home birth would be great.

Since I'm due to give birth there again soon I've been keeping tabs on new relating to my local maternity ward and saw relatively recently that they are dedicating a team of midwives to promote women with uncomplicated pregnancies having home births? I think stuff like this is a great incentive to help with hospital overcrowding for women who do need hospitals, and to help the women who do choose to give birth at home to have a more positive burn experience.

I think maybe the partner vs no partner debate has deeper roots in the general poor standard of care and facilities available to women in this country. It's a shame it's considered so unrealistic to change this radically though.

No, that isn't what came next after that quote in your post Cherries. This was the whole paragraph

"As I said there is no either/or solution that will suit all women. It i's already the case that the NHS has changed its policy and that partners are allowed to stay on wards overnight, and I'm not aware of mass self discharges occurring since this decision was made." That was the end of your post. I'm not sure what you think I was quoting.

Anyway, I think it's helpful to be clear that this isn't an NHS wide policy that will be soon be enforced in all postnatal wards.

No, sadly, it's really common to be told you can't have your curtains closed all day. Mostly so the staff can easily keep an eye on everyone in the bay, and on my postnatal ward it was also so the jaundiced babies got sunlight apparently. You could sometimes have them closed during visiting. The rest of the day, no curtains, and other people's partners sitting there feet away.

You're mistaken in thinking it's NHS policy, i.e. that it is policy for every postnatal ward to allow men 24hr access. It clearly isn't, and it isn't necessarily going to be taken up by every NHS trust. I gave the example of the hospital I gave birth in where they recently had a trial and chose not to continue with it due to overwhelmingly negative feedback from women.

The reason I think it's being pushed by some as a great idea is to paper over the cracks, to cover up inadequate care by using relatives to provide basic care to patients. How is that an acceptable idea in one of the richest countries in the world?

And wtf Assassinated - the next sentence I said after the quote you just posted was "obviously I was wrong!"

And okay, I was wrong, I absolutely concede that, the stuff I read online gave me the impression that it was a thing (can't bring myself to use the P word again) that they were intending to roll out everywhere. I'm still not entirely sure why it has quite so much relevance to all the other points I made (which are my opinion, which I am entitled to just like you are)

Assassinated I still don't get the huge offence caused by me saying it's a policy? It is in some places?

I don't get why that's an issue - it was a question and I specifically said it was my local hospital? If I didn't convey what I meant very well, all I meant was that I assumed there must have been some kind of reasoning or support behind this move to warrant it being practiced in hospitals, even if it's not all of them.

Also, I said "I do apologise".

I don't owe you anything Littlekiwi, and FWIW I did find that post condescending, regardless of who it was aimed at. I made a mistake in assuming that everyone was entitled to have their curtains closed and therefore have some semblance of privacy. Another poster pointed out I was wrong about this and I have apologised, as I genuinely didn't know this was a thing.

When I said I felt ridiculed, it was in regard's to my opinion laid out in my OP on this thread, long before that comment was made.

"It i's already the case that the NHS has changed its policy and that partners are allowed to stay on wards overnight"...

This is why people have taken issue with you arguing it's NHS policy to allow partners on wards Cherries:

"This article says that it is a policy that was rolled out? Everything I've read in media refers to it as a policy."

"In the hospital I'm at it is standard that partners can stay overnight and I actually thought this was NHS guidelines"

Though you're now starting to sound contrite I note you still haven't apologised or retracted your victim blaming comment.

do you* goodness

Lexie where do live??

I was fortunate enough to give birth at a NHS hospital were you had your own ensuite room after labour.

Partners were asked not to collect meals for new mums, mums either need to collect or it's to be bought to her.

It was a really nice experience. My partner was with me the whole time

Haha no we're not!

I thought she was calling me poppet, like "hun"

Sorry 53rd, the comments she was referring to sounded like the comment's I had made and I did look but didn't see a post from someone called poppet, I must have missed it

Are you and Poppet are the same person, Cherries? #namechangefail