I also gave birth at home, with assistance from two fantastic Albany midwives.
I had known them both from the very first appointment and they emphasised that they would be with me on the day, whether that was at home or hospital.
Their emphasis was on the mother's choices during pregnancy, labour and childbirth. They empower women to give birth in the way that they want. Although I had a successful home birth, my placenta was retained. Both MWs stayed with me while I was transferred to hospital and operated on to remove it, even though it was 4am and they had done their job of delivering the baby. For this support, I will always be eternally grateful.
There is some political background to this move - in my opinion.
There is pressure for the government to provide better midwifery care which concentrates on increased support for women by seeing the same midwives continuously throughout pregnancy, and by improving the provision for homebirth choice.
These things are, of course, more expensive at the outset than the factory farming style of ante-natal care that PCTs prefer. (although ultimately the considerably lower intervention/surgical rate means that money is saved, I believe that this never goes back into the pockets of the midwifery budget, so one to one care is simply seen as an expensive luxury by those controlling ante-natal budgets)
It has been suggested that the Albany was set up as an experiment that was doomed to fail. Why else would you choose to put this practice in one of the poorest boroughs in England with extremely high levels of poverty, poor educational attainment levels, and a huge population for whom English was not a first language? If it did fail, the government could say "well, you're better off in hospital, this one-to-one midwifery thing isn't working".
Except it did work. Incredibly well. he satsifaction factor from the new mothers is inestimable - as seen in the Guardian video. They had high rates of home birth, much higher than average rates of breastfeeding, and extremely low rates of intervention. T
[quote] The Albany has been thoroughly evaluated twice, has a far lower Caesarean section rate than King?s College Hospital (14.4% compared with 24.1%) and a far lower perinatal mortality rate (4.9/1000 compared with 11.4/1000) for Southwark Borough as a whole.[/quote]
It seems that there have been two cases in which births at King's resulted in problems, and because the midwives are essentially independent (and therefore not bound to work to King's protocols) they have closed them down even though there is absolutely no evidence that it was the protocol differences that were the cause of any of the problems.
The Albany emphasise the woman's right to choose. They are all extremely bright and highly educated midwives who explain the choices clearly. There is a very telling quote at the end of the Guardian article which reads
[quote] Professor Alison Macfarlane, a healthcare statistician at City University, has written a critique of the way the cases used for the report were selected. The Albany midwives said they would not discuss the report, because it was confidential, but drew attention to a remark of the authors, who said: "The study methodology employed does not lend itself to a meaningful statistical analysis."[/quote]
If this is the case, then it looks like the Albany have been scapegoated to a higher political cause, which is taking away a woman's right to choose her form of childbirth care, and that means we all lose.
I will be supporting the campaign to save the albany.