Tongue tie assessment?

[ReeseWitherfork]

I’m wondering whether my newborn has a tongue tie issue, but not sure who I should contact for assessment. Anyone with experience please?

Your GP, they will refer you to hospital if needed

The hospital should check this before you're discharged. That being said, they missed a severe posterior tie in our DD despite me asking specifically for them to check due to it running in the family.

You can speak to your GP and they can refer you but the referrals from what I was told are taking months. Obviously different areas have different wait times.

We ended up paying for a private midwife/lactation consultant to come to our home, assess DD, help me with feeding, make a combination feeding plan and snip her tie.
It was the best £200 ive ever spent after 3 weeks of asking for an NHS tongue tie assessment.

As @RedHerring24 experienced, TY is often missed, both my babies had it and we had to go private for assessment. Unless you are lucky in your area an NHS consultation takes too long to be very helpful if trying to establish breastfeeding.

There’s a professional association of TT practitioners with a list here: www.tongue-tie.org.uk/find-a-practitioner/

We used Suzanne Barber - she is excellent.

In Canada, breastfeeding clinics assess for tongue tie. Paediatrician will refer to one.
Waiting on our appointment

My hospital in the UK does not routinely check for tongue tie. Have you had all of your at-home midwife checks? If not, you can ask them - be clear you believe your DC has one & that it's affecting feeding. Make sure they actually look in the mouth, one midwife told me my DD didn't have one (when she did) based on looking at the latch on my boob 🙄the midwife can then refer you to the feeding team.Wait times will depend on your hospital and how they manage their waitlists - ours prioritised so it took a week from diagnosis to having it snipped, but it would have taken longer if a baby with a higher priority came up.

Current advice in the U.K. is not to check for tongue tie routinely, only if there’s a feeding issue. The idea being that most tongue ties don’t cause a problem and don’t need snipping. 🤷‍♀️

Thanks all. Really useful to read the replies. DD possibly won’t have much success then as feeding isn’t a massive issue (as in, she’s generally putting on weight, albeit maybe not at the pace she should be). We’ve got no more midwife visits, but not had GP 6 week check yet and still have one more HV check. She just struggles to latch and is very unsettled after a feed so I’m sure somethings going on. It’s the clicking noise she makes when feeding that has me suspicious. Thanks for the link @Hawkmother I think I’ll explore that avenue, looks like there are some practitioners not far from me.

I think it’s worth following up. Struggling to latch may well count as a feeding problem.

Hi I’m a maternity nurse and see this often

sadly most midwives and health visitors are not trained in tt

mum struggled to feed esp if bf and baby isn’t latching well or clicking are often signs

its a cost but if you can I would pay for private

if in Kent surrey or south london then I know a wonderful tt practioner and who I always reconmend

if not then put postcode in here to find one near you

www.tongue-tie.org.uk/find-a-practitioner/