"Crocus Home Birth Team"

We recommend and encourage anyone that is pregnant in the Croydon area to contact the Crocus Home Birth Team. The midwives provided a personal, tailored service which was on par with private healthcare.

Our story - this is our second home birth - the first home birth was with private midwives.

There was no complaints with the private care we received but felt we were experienced enough to go with NHS.

For this pregnancy we were originally booked with East Surrey, but after a number of appointments we were told that East Surrey Home Birth Team would not come out to us.

At this point we transferred to the Crocus Team, which was a dramatically better service.

For a start we saw the same midwife for the majority of our appointments, but also met our second midwife closer to the due date.

With East Surrey we had not seen the same midwife twice (transferred at 26 weeks).

Our appointments were generally held at our house unless they were scans.

The Crocus Team gave the flexibility of seeing us on weekends which meant that we could both be present at the appointments.

The appointments were more relaxed as they were in our own environment and our daughter also got to participate and meet the people who were going to be delivering her sister prior to d-day.

Listening to our babies heartbeat was a family event.

We had open dialogue with our midwives throughout the pregnancy and after our daughter was born via text or WhatsApp.

All our calls were answered first time and whatsapp/texts were answered promptly.

Seeing the same people throughout also made it a little easier to ask the embarrassing questions and we didn't have any major worries about the big day as we had discussed all eventualities.

Both our midwives were invested in our pregnancy as they had travelled the journey with us. We had a scare when our little ones movement reduced (circa 34 weeks) and we went to hospital to be monitored - the midwife popped in to see how everything was going. Caught us eating a very unhealthy dinner of crisps from a vending machine.

Both midwives were not keeping time on our appointments.

The appointments finished when all our questions were answered and checks.

They always followed up whenever they said they would.

The actual birth went very smoothly and quickly.

Part of that is feeling relaxed in our own environment and knowing who is going to be delivering your child (and apparently 2nd babies come quicker).

I would not consider a hospital birth by choice if we decided to go for a third on the strength of the experience with the Crocus Team.

Thank you to both midwives for your support throughout.

We have very fond memories (and pictures) of our journey together.

Liz & Liam