Which is the best NHS Maternity hospital in London?

[Louise001]

I'm due to choose between Chelsea & West. or St. Thomas?

By the best, I guess I mean the staff, the care, the facilities, the wards, cleanliness etc.,

Thanks in advance!
x

You can use www.which.co.uk or the NHS website to compare differences between hospitals including things like number of live births, levels of birth interventions and so on. You can also look at reports from the Care Quality Commission (cqc) on each hospital. They rank the services in the hospital so you can look specifically at maternity care.

You should also consider which factors are most important to you. E.g. do you want a water birth and if so how many birthing pools are available and are there any on the labour ward vs the midwife led unit. Do you Think you might want an epidural? These are not available on the midwife led unit, so if you started in the MLU and wanted the epidural you would need to be transferred to the labour wars, so consider if the MLU is on the same site as the labour ward (I assume with both they would be). Also consider which is closer to home. If you go into labour how will you get there and how far is it to travel and what if they send you back home (e.g. not in established labour ).

I had a recent Chelsea birth in midwife led unit and it was fantastic. Rooms are lovely, clean and modern, and more importantly the care is excellent. They were do compassionate and professional. I honestly couldn't have imagined being in better hands. And we were allowed to stay in the room with the double bed for 24h after birth which was the icing on the cake (only because it was quiet!)

There really won't be anything to choose between them in terms of standards of care or professionalism of staff.

I suggest you go for the one with the easiest/most relatable journey from your house (and regular haunts) and check availability/affordability if parking if you need it.

My rule of thumb was to stay on the same side if the river if at all possible.

I'm with Chelsea at the moment and being honest I haven't been hugely impressed. I've yet to meet the same midwife twice, I had one very early on who put the fear of god in me and told me I was going to need injections of warfarin daily from 16 weeks (family history of high blood pressure) only for the consultant to turn around and say I needed no such thing. They've cocked up my blood tests 3 times, so I had to go through the awful 3 hour GD test twice and am now due to go back again for another round of bloods that they 'mislabelled' last time. Appointments all feel pretty rushed - I'm 32 weeks and no one has even broached the subject of the birth with me yet, just run the routine checks and then asked me to leave.

However the above may be issues that happen at any big city hospital. I'm hoping my experience for the birth will be better though as a couple of friends have given birth there too and been very positive about it.