Would a private Health Visitor service be of interest to you ?

[Off2sleep]

Hello parents living in sw w london surrey and Berks.I am considering starting an affordable private health visiting service. I have been a Health Visitor by background for many years but diversified when the service to my mind started to become run down.My question is would people be interested in such a service ? What would you like to see in it ? I do have additional sleep qualifications but dont want to just offer that.id love to hear your thoughts about this
Thank you for reading x

I think your branding is off. Most people find health visitors to be annoying and intrusive with outdated advice. They don’t want the NHS ones. They certainly don’t want to pay for one privately.

But there is a demographic (not me personally) who will pay for sleep consultants and nursery nurses, postnatal doulas and that sort. If you can offer those services and the market is not already completely saturated in London/Surrey, then there may be some hope. It’s not something I would think is worth paying for myself though.

Agree with @mindutopia.

Snap. I’d have paid not to have to see the health visitor. She had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

I liked seeing my health visitor but I’m perhaps in a minority then!

I agree though that people are more likely to pay for a service that addresses a specific need in their heads. I liked seeing my HV because she was lovely, validating and it gave me a non-specific sense that the state was looking out for me and my son. I also thought of it as a faster route into NHS services if we needed them (I don’t know if that would actually have been the case btw). I don’t think paying for it would have given me that same sense as I’m not sure how GPs would react to referrals from a private HV.

Plenty of families don’t like having a HV including from the NHS. You could add that to your poll.

No, my NHS health visitor was incredible. Both of them - different counties with different babies. Wouldn't pay privately for a service the NHS provided free at the point of access.

God no, I opted out off all HV services found them highly annoying and when they would say they would do something they never bothered. Mine threatened me with social services because my sons booster jabs were late during bloody lockdown!! Never again!

I would brand yourself as something else.

I don’t get all the HV hate on here. Mine were fine it was like two or three visits.

However I agree people wouldn’t pay for “health visitor” but postnatal intensive 1-2-1 support from a qualified nurse / sleep consultant etc might be a goer.

Is this like that free birth movement? Unregulated profit driven people exploiting the fearful

I don't live in your targeted area but hope it's still okay to comment.
Where I am, there is no shortage of health visitors so literally everyone I know has been seen by them. I saw two different ones and one was giving outdated advice 😬
The other one was lovely but personally, I knew what I was doing and didn't feel like I needed a HV but was too scared to tell them no in case that offended them. So as such, I didn't gain anything from this service but I know other mums who said HVs massively stressed them out.

Service I would happily pay for - lactation consultants.

We only saw one once, told me baby was fine and I needed to stop worrying, baby was in ICU 5 hours later.
They then left me shitty voicemails about the cost of missed appointments when baby was still in hospital, so I opted out of the service and filed a complaint. Never heard back on either.
Agree with all pp above, no one would pay for HV!

So sorry you had to go through something so stressful.

There's something majorly wrong with HV training. My lactation consultant was going to find and speak to my HV due to info she was spreading with regards to breastfeeding. The HV was newly qualified so you'd think she'd have the up to date info!

I bought my own baby scales to avoid the health visitor!

No. I had a NHS health visitor assigned. It seemed like a pointless, outdated role to me. Of no benefit to me whatsoever.

In general, an awful lot of people have very negative experiences with HVs and find them a hindrance that makes a difficult time worse, or at least just a waste of time and an unnecessary fuss that makes no difference.

Of course this isn't universal; there will be plenty of very good, helpful HVs which a lot of new mums will welcome and appreciate.

Agree woth others- I wouldn't pay for this. I live in SW London and what my peers and I did pay for, were maternity nannies, mothers helps and postnatal doulas.

Like others, I heartily disliked the NHS health visitor, found the whole system intrusive (I had to go to her, but with an implicit threat that if you don’t go, they come to you) and the advice was poor. But I can see the point of the system, which helps stop women and babies falling through the cracks.

A better service would be great- better advice, no endless waiting. But how would your private service interact with the NHS one? Surely the NHS health visitor would still want to see mothers and babies to ensure that all is well? It so, the private service would lose its appeal- I certainly wouldn’t want double the appointments.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I can't help thinking that the whole purpose of HVs is to cover the NHS/government by ticking boxes and avoiding any legal claims from people who didn't instinctively know the very obvious basics of childcare, as well as checking up for any potential concerns (however absurd) - but they know that framing them as 'government spies' won't be welcomed, so they frame them as 'health visitors - coming to offer you practical advice and support'.

Not all of them of course, but so many HVs are so pointless, bad and lacking in the common sense or empathy that would naturally be believed to be essential for the job that it makes it very difficult indeed to believe that they really are there for the purpose as claimed. It would be like sending Greg Davies to the Jockey Club and furiously insisting that he's going to be their new star rider!

Only on Mumsnet. In the real world families use the service. My local baby clinic run by the HVs is always packed.

No thank you. I don’t believe health visitors are useful in any way shape or form. A new mother supporter maybe, health visitors…meh!

Services I might have considered paying for if I was wealthier because the NHS either doesn't offer them or doesn't donate great job when they do:
-feeding support
-weaning advice
-sleep consultant
-post birth recovery, whatever the type of birth (this is actually the biggest gap in the market imo, NHS support is close to zero and stops after the first few weeks, very little out there, everything is baby-focused)

A business model I think could work would be an expanded one stop shop type service that could offer all of the above (not necessarily all offered by you personally) and possibly others I've not thought of as at the moment it's almost always individuals offering this stuff.

Going By when my daughter was born, I felt there wasn’t enough support, what I would have benefited from back then was support with sleep, weaning, DD had CMPA so real help with weaning back into cows milk, potty training etc.

Not sure how you’d ’brand’ this but a lot of new mums either haven’t got someone in their corner to ask stuff or are a long way from home. So like a HV but more a clinically evidenced support? Also in the states now they are doing consierge nursing so could you combine the 2?

That's awful.immunisationd are parental choice and not mandatory .

I would have paid for some kind of health visitor/ nanny hybrid type service. Someone to visit every few weeks for an hour, give encouragement and also have the baby for a few hours so I could sleep or go out amd get a coffee.