Antenatal Classes

[AliMidwife]

Hello all.

I am a qualified practising midwife and myself and a colleague have started to run private antenatal classes in the South London and Surrey area.
We started to run our workshops about a year ago and the hardest part seems to be getting the word out!! We are finding that people book with the NCT very early in pregnancy. Does anyone have any ideas of how we can target you girls earlier or how to get the word out. When we started we researched and there are lots of Midwives offering this service around the country so please do keep a look out for them!
I will tell you a little bit about our classes

We run a 6 hour interactive workshop with small groups of between 3-8 couples, encouraging future support networks to be formed. As we deliver babies on a day to day basis, we feel that we are able to give parents the relevant information on the realities of childbirth unlike many antenatal classes run by other organisations. Our classes cover all aspects of labour, childbirth and the postnatal period. We discuss homebirth and hypnobirthing to emergency section preparing you for any eventuality that labour can bring. We have written a 50 page information pack that will be given to you to take away. This gives you information on options for pain relief, what to pack in your birth bag, when to call the hospital, positions for labour and birth etc. We provide lunch and refreshments throughout the day and give you relevant leaflets and samples that you may like to take away with you.

If you are interested please look at our website www.antenatlclass.net for further details and to contact us.

Any ideas how to get our classes into newly pregnant peoples heads would be very greatly received!! We are 2 Midwives with not very good business brains :) !!

Posting on here is a good start!

I like your website, and would have been interested in coming, except it's a bit late for me now as I've reached 39 weeks.

Will the hospital you work for allow you to have leaflets there? I know ours handed out stuff that was not directly connected to the hospital. Also try notice boards - there is one at my GP surgery, and also the local library?

I second noticeboards. When I wait for mw appointments in my local hospital there are 2 noticeboards full of various baby related info/classes etc, and, having nothing to do usually but sit and look at the boards means I read all of them (especially as mw often runs late!). I've also seen noticeboards at private places where you can get baby scans, that might be another idea.

can you do classes in chelsea/south kensington/knightsbridge area? that would be useful. there is not enough of these around here.

Thanks so much for your ideas girls. Fab idea about the 3d scanning places, we will definately do that!! Its so annoying as our hospital has banned us from advertising at work and I cant mention it to any of my ladies in Clinic etc! Very very hard to keep quiet.
With regard to the South Kensington/Chelsea location- we would love to expand out but its really the cost of hiring a room! We run the classes so cheaply at £80 for the 6 hours with croissants/fresh coffee/cakes/fruit/lunch etc and the pack thats all made up, we really just break even when we run each class! (At the moment its all about the love!) so we can probably go elsewhere in the more expensive areas when our business grows and we can put the price up a little bit!

Thanks so much for reading this girls and giving me a bit more motivation. We need to keep trying as I do think theres a demand out there and I really do think women arnt getting what they pay for with other organisations . People are coming onto labour ward with unrealistic expectations and feeling dissapointed with themselves if they end up not having the delivery that they may have expected to have, which then could lead to feeling low and postnatal depression!! I think if we can give you girls info about all of the possible situations that can occur it will empower you all to have much more calm birth experience. I work as a community Midwife and on a low risk birth centre and my colleagu is a high risk midwife so we can give a bit of expert advice for everything!

Please tell any friends about our classes. Your all wonderful for replying
xx

I think this looks great. Just a point to note though - I've spent ages trying to get onto www.antenatlclasses.net as it's typed above! Thankfully I have now managed to get on the site and I think it looks great.

I would have been interested in this if I hadn't already booked NCT. It would have saved me a lot of money and would hopefully provide much of what I was looking for with NCT. The only problem for me would have been dates. I'm due end of january so have missed the November date and the date in January is too late.

I would agree with the comment about trying to get something on the notice boards in the antenatal clinics. As others have said, we spend a lot of time sitting there waiting for appointments and do tend to read anything and everything!

I wish you lots of luck with this venture. The website looks very professional and I'm sure if you can get it advertised in the right way, you will get lots of clients.

Thanks so much for spotting that Anne! Our website address is www.antenatalclass.net Really sorry you will be missing the Jan date but do let us know if baby number two comes along in a few years and you need more classes! Good luck with your birth, I really hope it goes well for you.