Experience of Maternity Services at Royal Free London

[WorriedFTM19376]

Does anyone have any recent experience of giving birth at the Royal Free Hospital?

I read a tragic newspaper article of an incident this year where a mum and baby died, and it was followed by a lot of comments with people sharing their own negative experiences.
Some experiences were from a few years ago, so I'm wondering have things generally improved and this was a (horrendous) but isolated incident. Or, are there more widespread issues?

NC (if I did it correctly) as I'd rather not link to other posts.

Had babies at RFH and had superlative care,empathic mw and consultants
All my births were CS

Thank you for replying HeelsHandbagPerfumeCoffee. Good to know there's good experiences out there!

I need to be clear all trusts have serious incident and unfortunately deaths
Health care is by nature a risky undertaking
By all means discuss with your mw,it’s ok to explore misgivings and ask what actions have been taken to remediate poor practice and or shortcomings

I completely agree, although slightly concerned that my MW seemed a little dismissive of some concerns today- I didn't push the point though.

It feels so awkward as I actually work at the same hospital (totally different areas) and was oblivious to any issues.
Just quite shocked by the facebook posts.

Ok,so you gather the info,you read,you request a longer one off appt to discuss your queries
PALS is an option if you feel the mw is not adequately answering your specific queries, directly write to PALS

I haven’t read about that incident so this is just personal experience. I started my pregnancy booking into RFH til I was just over 20 weeks. I have to say that I didn’t have the best experience, obviously it was a difficult time (peak Covid) but I found a lot of the staff both support and mw quote brusque. I had someone particularly cold for my first scan where I was so nervous which put me off a bit. There was no continuity of care so
I saw many different people. I couldn’t tour the birth centre or ward because of covid restrictions but i was hoping for BC and it seemed to basically be right on the end of the labour ward and a bit of an afterthought. I ended up changing to St Mary’s in Paddington which was amazing. I saw the same midwife for all my appointments and met others in the team. The birth centre is wonderful there, so tranquil and a completely different non clinical vibe! I actually ended up with a c section for breech so didn’t get the BC experience but the labour ward was fine too and again majority of staff were great.
So long story short- I don’t have actual labour experience at RF but I didn’t get “good vibes” maybe consider checking out a couple of other hospitals and see how the experience differs.

The royal free is a hospital that specialises in infectious diseases, so of course during a pandemic their main focus will be on that.

You have loads of options in London. If you're not happy with them, use another

OP I'm not sure where you are based (I'm NW2) but I was choosing between RFH, Queen Charlotte's and St Mary's.

I'm 26 weeks and so far so good at QC's xxx

Thanks everyone.
I'm NW3...literally behind the RFH.
I had thought it would be silly to walk out of one hospital to travel to another.
Literally didn't even question things till I started seeing such negativity.

I will try and have a look around at other options too.

Every hospital has it detractors and it’s fans. They’ll all have had maternity deaths. You’ll read negative and positive reviews about all maternity units

You need to weigh up pro/con of staying local at RFH or another location

Other maternity locations may not be accepting out of area request because of COVID

Will you want to travel heavily pg?

Allow extra time as Travel time will be longer if you go to another location

Your postnatal care will revert to local team. So if you chose St Mary your postnatal care will be from your GP, not St Mary

Congratulations on pg, I wish you well

Thank you. That's helpful to consider the postnatal care too.