Children visiting

[Newnaim]

Just wondering if anyone knows what happens with your children visiting you in hospital?
Il be giving birth (hopefully) in the next two weeks and DD will be home with her dad while I do so.
Obviously nothings set in stone yet, if we're only there for the minimum time required after giving birth then I don't think she'll even come and visit as she's only a toddler and can see us both as soon as we're home. If for some reason me and baby have to stay in hospital for a few days TOUCH WOOD WE DONT, what would the protocol for DD visiting be? My MW said normal visiting hours don't apply but to what extent? How much will we be able to see eachother and will it be on the ward or in a family room or something?

I gave birth on Monday. The birthing rooms were all private and en-suite and I stayed in one room from being admitted to leaving with baby. Because of this, partners and immediate siblings were allowed to visit 24-7. My labour was only around 90 minutes, but i stayed in for nearly 24 hours and the staff were wonderful with me, my hubby and especially our daughter when she arrived to meet her sibling.

Thank you, I plan on haha giving birth in a birthing pool so will hopefully have a nice big room for us all to spend time together in. I just worry it'll be harder if for some reason we have to stay and are then on a ward. I had to stay for about 36 hours after DD was born so leaving shortly after with this one doesn't seem real!
Congratulations!

Where are you giving birth? It will vary by hospital. At my local trust children can only visit at visiting hours so either afternoon or evening. Partners can visit during the day (9am-9pm) but meal times are protected. You can ring the postnatal ward and ask about visiting?

To be honest based on my experience spending a lot of time in hospital both before and after my DDs birth it’s quite hard to entertain a child of any age for very long in a hospital environment (there aren’t often family rooms and unless you get a private room you’ll be up to the ward not massively long after giving birth) so I wouldn’t worry too much about visiting times.

hope good idea
user it's not so much her being able to spend a lot time there, more at a convenient time. The visiting hours are later afternoon-early evening and with the hospital being about an hour from home just won't be possible with her dinner& bed time

If your MW said normal visiting hours don't apply, I'm assuming she means that your dd falls under partner visiting hours. These are usually most of the day/evening, just not overnight (unless you are somewhere with private rooms where partners tend to stay overnight, but I assume they wouldn't want a child staying overnight, so probably doesn't apply in that case). Usually partner visiting hours are something like 8am-8pm, basically any reasonable time from breakfast until bedtime, but I would just ask specifically at your hospital.

Where I work on our postnatal Ward children of the woman can visit from 10am-10pm.

The ward I was on allowed your own children to visit during the partner visiting hours. This was 11am to 8.30pm.

At our hospital children could visit the same time as partners.

It varies between hospitals. At my hospital my children could visit any time when I was on labour ward/hdu and they could visit nicu/scbu any time too. On the postnatal ward they had to comply with non partners visiting times which were 3-5pm and 6-8pm. There wasn't much space on the ward though and they got bored quickly so dh used to bring them in for 10 minutes after school every day. It was awful, I missed them and dh so much.

Ds2 was born at 3pm, ds1 and my mum came in at 6pm to meet him. There are set visiting hours in our hospital but they don't apply them to very close relatives once there aren't loads of people in at one time. It was on the normal ward, if everyone with older children got time in a specific family room you'd need a lot of family rooms! I had a cs so was in 3 days, ds1 was in once or twice every day for 20-60 mins depending on how he was behaving.