Insights from The Tower Hamlets Homebirth team during the Covid-19 pandemic
The Tower Hamlets Homebirth team are immensely proud to be able to say that during the Covid-19 pandemic, we have been offering our services as normal to women and their families in Tower Hamlets.
In fact, we have seen a surge of women opting to birth at home and we have been able to offer women individualised, high quality, safe care. The coronavirus has caused many women to consider home-birthing as an option, and others have not wanted to attend to main Royal London Hospital due to its status as a ‘Covid Hospital’.
Although we have been a lot busier than normal, we have managed well, and we owe this success to being well supported by the maternity managers and our positive team dynamics. We are a team of 4 midwives and each midwife has been flexible and supportive of each other, even doing extra on calls to ensure coverage. We have had challenges along the way, however, we have overcome these by directly communicating with the appropriate people and we have also been having regular catch-up sessions as a team to keep everyone updated on the continual changes to protocols.
We have had to adapt our care to less face-to-face encounters and more phone calls, however, the women have been very understanding of this and due to our case loading model of care we know our women well and can provide to each individual’s care needs in detail. Although we wish for the virus to end and for things to return to ‘normal’ again, we hope that more women will continue to use our home-birth services in the future.
A family we recently provided care for stated: “we are so grateful to the Tower Hamlets Homebirth Team to helping us birth our baby girl at home. We felt safe and the level of care was the best we’ve ever experienced. We are so thankful that we did not have to attend the hospital, and giving birth at home was so much more convenient. We had not considered home-birthing before but now we will recommend it to everyone!” (From a mother and father having their 3rd baby).