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Antenatal health care visitor

Posted By Laura128

"Antenatal health care visitor"

About: Children & younger people's services / Broxtowe Healthy Family Team

(as the patient),

I had a health care visitor come to visit me at my home when I was 37 weeks pregnant. I found the visit to be very intrusive and a lot of personal and unnecessary questions asked that made me feel uncomfortable, e.g. Do you know who your child might look like? Does it make you reflect on your own childhood? What kind of parents will you be? 

These are questions I'd expect a qualified therapist that I decided to visit to ask - not a health care worker.  
I expected the visit to be more about providing me with information, e.g safety precautions, baby groups I could attend etc. 
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Responses

Response from Gail Renshaw, Professional Service Lead, Broxtowe Healthy Families Team, Community Health Services 4 years ago
Gail Renshaw
Professional Service Lead, Broxtowe Healthy Families Team,
Community Health Services

Submitted on 24/12/2019 at 14:50
Published on Care Opinion at 15:39


Afternoon Laura.

Firstly please let me apologise for the delay in responding to your posting but this was due to trying to identify if your concern related to the Healthy Families Team (HFT) or Family Nurse Partnership (FNP).

I am sorry that your experience of the antenatal contact was not as you had expected it to be. We like to ensure that our new parents to be are treated with warmth, understanding, respect and not left feeling upset or confused. Our antenatal contact is to provide you with details of services available to you, information about the Healthy Families Team, routine contact points and the services provided until your new baby reaches adulthood. We use this opportunity to discuss with you any expectations that you have and build a relationship with your health visitor prior to the birth.

From reading your posting it appears that your health visitor has used the promotional guide or Reach questions to guide the antenatal contact without fully explaining the purpose of these to you. Your responses to the questions are used to help the initial assessment of what level of health input you may require in the future for yourself or baby. In particular the Reach questions help to establish the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) that you were exposed to and could have an impact in the future. This is something that we are not currently using (but is by FNP) however this is being introduced in early 2020.

Again, I would like to apologise for your experience and hope that you will enjoy all future postnatal contacts. Your experience matters to us.

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