I am very happy to tell you that our home birth service is operating as usual...but, like everyone else, we had to put a few extra measures in place to keep everybody safe.
The Community Midwives Association has put our protocol together to ensure we are keeping everybody safe at home (please see our full protocol here).
I just want to emphasis some of the steps we have taken:
- Some hospital check ups like scans have to take place in the hospital. CUMH have set up excellent measures to ensure minimum exposure.
- Our liaison consultant will meet with you for the clinical assessment in a designated outreach clinic location
- The first new born check up will be moved into a designated area in CUMH, to minimise exposure and foot fall.
- In case a transfer from home to hospital is needed, we will hand over the care to the hospital based team.
- We ensure ambulance back up for every home birth at the time of onset of labour.
- We still have a second midwife attending.
These are only a few points to explain some of the changes in our service.
We are all working together to keep this danger under control and never was it so true to say: Stay safe, stay at home.