Private Options in Richmond/Kingston

[DaddyD]

Hi All. Hope you can help after reading another thread here. My wife is 8 weeks pregnant! Yay! We usually visit Richmond Private Practice for all our health needs (the local NHS GP shall we say has a lot to improve upon).

Today we visited to have a consult on package options for private care Pre and Post natal. However, the mid-wife would not be present with us during labour and I wondered what other options there are? Their suggestion was that they can either hand-over to the NHS for labour or that we go for private labour care . Her suggestion was with Dr. Chow at Kingston. My partner already has experience with Dr. Chow, but we are unsure if they do a complete Natal package.

The convenience for us is that Richmond Private Practice is right where we live. The only draw-back being that our mid-wife won't necessarily be present during the birth. (She does work for the NHS at Kingston so if she's on-duty she may be able to be there).

What are your wise thoughts? Totally out of my depth here.

The usual thing is that unless you go to a private hospital that is really geared up for births (e.g. Portland) then you'll be looking at using a private wing of an NHS hospital for birth if you want private. The special care units, etc are all NHS so you want a hospital that has easy access to these.

Have you actually talked about birth options & preferences though? If you wanted a homebirth for example, then it's easy to either do this through the NHS or by hiring an independent MW. Most indy MWs can't work in NHS hospitals though so if you have to transfer, they can act as a doula only.

TBH I think you need to start with the basics - e.g. home birth, standalone midwife led unit birth, hospital attached MLU birth or consultant led ward hospital birth - and work from there!

Japhrimel pretty much said it all. The only thing to add is that you also have the option of using NHS say 80% of the way and then switching to private for the later care and delivery (at a reduced cost). A friend has done that for both pregnancies (to Queen Charlotte).