Labour of love yields new maternity unit

The Serenity Suite at Birmingham’s City Hospital is one of the latest in a growing number of midwife-led maternity units to be established throughout the UK, and is as different to a hospital ward as it can be. From the reception area, right through to the private rooms for expectant mothers, the decor is non-clinical, almost spa-like, with fulllength photographs of bluebell woods, the Norfolk coastline, and woodlands on a crisp autumn morning, adorning the walls. The thinking behind the unit is far from being merely cosmetic, but based soundly upon strong evidence, as Elaine Newell, head of midwifery, explains. She says: “A midwifery-led unit will be used only by women who have no complications at all in their pregnancy. There is a huge amount of evidence that shows that if you expose those women to the clinical setting of a busy labour ward, where there is intervention by doctors, and a lot of clinical equipment around, then there will be a massive impact upon their labour and their labour outcomes. “However if you channel those women into an environment where it is very homely, and very relaxed, they need less pain relief, they are more likely to have a straightforward delivery outcome, they are less likely to require any medical intervention, and more likely to have a positive birth experience and do things like breast-feed. So the environment is very important, and has a huge effect upon the woman’s experience of her labour and birth.”

Use of birthing pools

A key part of this is the use of birthing pools in the five en suite birthing rooms – every room has facilities to provide women with a water birth if they choose to, and double beds for resting after birth. Only one of the rooms, however, has a permanent birthing pool in situ, as the others are equipped with portable birthing pools that are inflated when necessary. This also sets a challenge, as all the equipment must not only meet the design brief, and be as ‘home-like’ as possible, but must also still meet all the necessary clinical standards laid down in Health Technical Memoranda (HTM) and Health Building Notes. The solution is an elegant mixture of high-tech digital technology coupled with common sense. Although all the equipment is right at the forefront of current practice, it is still contained with a setting as domestic as it can be in the circumstances, as Paul Scott, estates and technical/capital projects manager with Sandwell & West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, explains. “We’ve set up systems so that staff can bring the deflated pools into the birthing rooms, inflate them, and then leave the water running so that it will automatically fill the baths three-quarters full while the staff are busy elsewhere,” he says.