"Maternity unit"

Anything else?

The actual labour facility & the staff there were excellent. I could not fault the care I received whilst in active labour. Unfortunately my aftercare on Gloucester ward was poor. I'd had an emergency c-section & my son was in SCBU. I never felt I'd had a proper explanation as to why. It was incredibly difficult being on a ward with other mothers who had their babies with them and I didn't have mine. I had to really push for my son to be brought to me. The communication between SCBU & my ward was poor. Just before visiting hours my son was with me when SCBU requested my son go back down to SCBU even though my dad was about to arrive to see him for the first time. When my husband took him down to SCBU he was told they didn't actually need my son for an hour but we weren't allowed to take him back upstairs to meet his grandad for the first time. On the same day, literally 5 minutes before visiting hours were due to start, a breast feeding nurse offered to teach me how to express. Naturally as my Dad was about to arrive I said it wasn't a good time. I felt the staff member could have used a bit more common sense then. I had also been told by SCBU that if I needed help breast feeding I would have to ask a nurse to come with me to SCBU as they weren't able to help. I mentioned this to the breast feeding nurse who had spoken to me earlier and, I quote, her response was "I don't have time to do that and if you want to go down to SCBU you will need to find your own wheelchair". She said this to me the day after I'd had my c-section so I was still in a lot of pain. To tell me I need to find my own wheelchair is, frankly, totally unacceptable and was incredibly upsetting. My discharge was also very poorly handled. I was told I could go home on the Friday but despite a lot of chasing midwives/nurses/doctors I was given no information and even at 10pm at night I still thought I had a chance of going home only to be told, at that point and after asking for information yet again, that actually I couldn't go home. All day we had asked for updates. No-one ever gave us any information. When I was eventually discharged on the Saturday I wasn't seen by a doctor. We also were not briefed on what would be included in my take home prescription. We were not told there would be needles in the prescription (for the DVT injection) and had no idea how to operate them. Luckily I saw a community midwife the next day who was able to administer an injection but she was flabbergasted that I hadn't been told these would be in my prescription nor shown how to use them and given no instruction on how to dispose of the needles. She took them away in her sharps bin otherwise they would have gone in our general waste. However, to re-iterate the service I received in the consultant led until was flawless & also in recovery after my c-section where I stayed nearly 18 hours due to some minor complications. However, post-natal care leaves a lot to be desired.