midwife staffing Vs getting my homebirth??

[mad4mainecoons]

Just wondering what your experiences were.

the maternity support worker called in today to drop off my homebirth kit (im 37 weeks) and asked how i was, to which i replied excited, and feeling really positive about the prospect of a homebirth if all remains well with me and bump .

and she said, well yes, you will be lucky if you do get one anyway, because the midwives are often too busy and you may be made to go into the hospital to deliver, as there will be noone to attend you at home

so im wondering how common this is, that you miss out on a homebirth for the simple reason of staffing levels!

does anyone have any experience??
im in North cornwall and i suppose it does vary between areas of the country.

I spoke to my midwife today because this has been weighing on my mind and she says it is a complete none issue.

In 20 years she has never told anyone they have to come and the midwifes allocated to homebirths are the community midwifes who fully expect to be oncall and available to women at home and do not take away resources from hospitals.
If ALL the community midwifes, that's 16 in my area were unavailable then they would ask those from neighbouring districts and then bank staff, so really it's nothing for anyone to worry about.

Hmm, rhinohide - now who's getting personal? I accept that foxy had a deeply traumatic personal experience. I apologise if I underplayed that because she was quite obviously left traumatised. But I feel that her statements about hospitals being only for 'sick people' and creating 'bad practices that have damaged lives' are, to the extent that they seek to persuade people to have HBs, potentially very dangerous. I am for anyone's right to have a HB but I would never seek to persuade anyone to do so by running down hospitals. My mother had a perfectly 'normal' first birth in hospital. For her second birth she had a HB - very common at the time. The baby got stuck and she haemmoraged so badly that, had the family not fortuitously moved a few months earlier from Clyst St Mary to the centre of Exeter, ie near the hospital, she would definitely have died. Far from 'damaging lives' the hospital saved her and needless to say she went on to have her third child safely in hospital. I am all for choice and have suggested better funding to allow for choice. Scare-mongering people into HBs is not promoting choice and 'stamping your foot and demanding a MW' (as another poster, not me, has put it) is not a responsible and mature way to deal with current funding issues. I am very glad that MillyMollys trust has enough community MWs to deal with all HBs. Plenty of other areas, as experts have explained on this thread, do not have easily accessible 'banks' of spare MWs. If they did why on earth would the original poster have been told there might be a problem? Why indeed, when things go wrong in or out of hospital, do we frequently read reports of a 'chronic shortage of MWs'? I apologise if I too have now gone on at length. I repeat that I support choice. But scare-mongering about hospitals is something that I find unacceptable - okay for my own personal reasons. I recognise that we should never conflate personal or family experiences into 'the whole story' - I shouldn't do that but nor should others. A balanced, less 'foot-stamping' and more mature approach to HBs would allow women to take their own decision in conjunction with their own advisors.

"Plenty of other areas, as experts have explained on this thread, do not have easily accessible 'banks' of spare MWs. If they did why on earth would the original poster have been told there might be a problem?"

Sadly, sometimes women are told this routinely, irrespective of the truth. It's a line that is trotted out without any thought at all as to what is available and when. I was told there were none available, and this confused me, as I had been told by my own community MW only a few hours earlier on the day, that I shouldn't worry, she had contacted the hospital and told them of my impending birth, and that there were more than enough community on-call MWs to deal with me that night.

The next morning, when I spoke to her (after the lovely arrival of DD at home), I said what they had told me on the phone. She checked the records and saw that there were no other homebirths being attended to that night, and that there were in fact 6 community MWs available "for me", and I obviously only took the time up of 2. So I then asked her why the MW at the hospital had told me there weren't enough and that I should come in? And she replied "sadly, that happens a lot with a busy hospital - they don't always want to deal with the admin that goes with a HB - phoning around to see who's available and so on". So it sounded to me like the MW on the phone didn't even take one look at what was available - she was conditioned (for whatever reason) to say "no you'll have to come in" - irrespective of what the truth is.

This is why I said to the OP to stand her ground - obviously she cannot possible know what the truth is when she's spoken to on the phone, but she should know before she goes into labour that there are banks of MWs and not to be fobbed off by the first stressed, not-particularly pro-homebirth MW she speaks to on the phone.

Bellissima - well said.

no bellisima, I have rhinohide.