"Childbirth"

Our first baby was delivered at Newham on 8 Sep 2018 through emergency C section. Overall the experience was good and we got a quality maternity service. Couple of things which we wanted to highlight are:

- handover between midwives at the end of duty should be improved - we stayed in hospital for 4 days and were looked after by at least 10 midwives in total due to change in shifts. We noted that the coordination and handover from one to another was not smooth or effective, as we had to explain again and again our whole situation to in-coming midwife (such as what is happening, medications? etc). On various occasions, the incoming midwife was not fully aware of patient's details and the labour status etc.

- midwives took multiple blood samples on numerous occasions. For three of the samples, they told us that the sample has to be taken again as the latest extracted blood is wasted due to delay in the testing by the pathologist (or lack of coordination b/w maternity staff and pathologists?). At the end of our stay in hospital, my wife was left with severe pain and purple bruises all over her both hands due to needles!

- Pharmacy should keep formula milk as well (as there is no nearby Tesco/ asda etc)