"Quick first time birth"

Our son was born at QEUH recently, and all in all our experience was really good. As a first-time mom, everything went slightly quicker than we all were prepared for. After being in and sent home by 10 am (2cm dilated), we came back at 2.30pm (6cm dilated), when they told me they were trying to get me a room in the labour ward.

My memory is a bit blurry, but according to my husband we didn't get there until about 2,5-3 hours later and I gave birth after under 1 hour. The midwife and nurse from maternity assessment ended up having to follow me up to the labour ward, since there wasn't any free labour midwives ready for me, if I understood it correctly.

The silver lining for me was that I got to keep the two people that had helped me since the start, all the way through to the arrival of our son. We can't thank the midwife and nurse enough for the kindness and support they gave throughout. They were amazing, and to be frank I was happy not to have to get new faces when arriving at labour, since I was pretty much already getting push-contractions at that point.

At the post-natal ward the staff was really lovely. We came up at night time and we were left alone, which I was very grateful for, but got immediate help if I pressed the buzzer. We opted to stay only for one night and day, as everything went really smoothly and our wee one took breastfeeding on really quickly. Huge thanks to the team for their support!

There is a few things I do feel the need to point out about this experience though.

First is the lack of adequate pain relief, beyond paracetamol, codeine and gas/air, if you get stuck in maternity assessment during your active labour. My plan was to opt for epidural in case it got too much for me, and I wasn't able to get it, since I didn't get moved to the labour ward with enough time for the anesthesiologist to get to me. It did go OK in the end, but I do feel that there should be better policies in place when this kind of things happens. The staff did what they could with the tools they had, but due to the current policy of who is able to administer anything else, I was kind of left out from proper medical pain management to the level I felt the need for.

Secondly, the bathroom in our room at the post-natal ward was out of order, so every time I needed to use the loo I had to sneak into other rooms, which felt really awkward and kind of intrusive on the other moms.

Thirdly, as both me and my husband have pre-settled status, we need extra paperwork on our son's birth, a Mother and baby discharge summary, in order to obtain his official citizenship in our home country. I forgot to ask about this at the time, so I called later on to request it, as I couldn't find any information online on how to get these papers.

My friend with the same situation was able to call the maternity ward and have it sent to his home two months earlier, but when I tried to do the same, I just got brushed off and told to write a physical letter to the head midwife. I managed to email them and was directed to the legal department. This is very confusing, and we can't be the only two couples this year with pre-settled status giving birth at QEUH? I think some kind of streamlining of the process would be very needed, where at least it would be very clear where to turn to get this paper.

Apart from these three very specific circumstances, the care and support we received was anything we could've asked for.