Birthing centres

[Absa]

Considering a birthing centre that is a different location to where I've been having my antenatal care. Same distance though give or take 10 minutes by car. Attached to a main hospital.

It looks great online / good reviews etc. and more up my street than a clinical hospital setting but obviously I can't visit in person to check it out.

My main question is for people that have used birthing centres - obviously you can only have gas and air / paracetamol as they are midwife led. If the pain becomes too much, can I request to be moved to the main hospital labour ward? If there are any issues will they automatically move me?

I've also been weighing up my choices - there's a lovely freestanding birth centre in my village or an alongside midwifery unit at my local hospital. I think in both of these you can also have pethidine (or alternative) for pain relief.

I was given this leaflet by my midwife: assets.nhs.uk/prod/documents/NHSE-your-choice-where-to-have-baby-first-baby-sept2018.pdf

It gives you loads of info on types of births in different settings and reasons for transfers from midwifery units to labour wards. Apparently 13.3% of transfers from an alongside unit are because of epidural requests so you can definitely do this.

Oh and one final thing I found quite helpful - the CQC inspect all NHS health services and report on things like safety, leadership and how caring the service is. You can search for your local services to compare them here: www.cqc.org.uk/

Sorry for such a long message! I was looking at all this for myself yesterday so it's fresh in my mind.

@youreallyarefantatsic thanks for the links -
That's really helpful info :)

Moving from in-hospital birth centre to the labour ward (for pain relief or if things veer off the course of "normal") is a very straightforward process generally. It happens all the time (I used to work in one). Sometimes the same midwife stays with you and sometimes you get a new midwife taking over your care, it depends on how that particular unit works.