"Nice hospital, nice staff, but one poor experience..."

What could be improved

I had both my 12 and 20 week scans of my firts child here and the two experience's contrasted greatly. At the 12 week scan the sonographer seemed to understand that it was a special occassion and made us feel at ease at all times and it felt like she was making a fuss of both us and the baby. The whole thing was a wonderful experience and so it was no surprise that we were doubly excited about our 20 week scan.

At the 20 week scan the sonograoher explained that she would scan for 15 mins taking the necessary measurements, then she would turn the screen to show me our baby. Which is fine, i completely understood, but for the next 15 mins all I could see was her serious expression while she scanned me, the serious face of her colleague, and my husband's puizzled and concerned face and he watched them and the screen. They felt like the longest 15 minutes of my life. When she finished she turned the screen to show me my baby. I had to actually ask if everything was normal as it didn't look as though she was going to tell me at all! Would it have killed her to talk to me a little bit as she went along "ok that looks normal, and that looks normal etc." My husband and I are both health professionals and were really disappointed with the experience.

After she showed us our baby's legs, arms, etc. she started wiping the jelly off my belly. There was no mention of sex, something we had our heart set on finding out, so I had to ask again. Unfortunaltely the baby was in a difficult posisiton to tell which is fine, it wasn't her fault but she could have just explained this to us in the first place. Don't sonographers realise that most people want to know the sex at 20 weeks?

Overall we were thoroughly disappointed with the experience and left feeling a bit deflated.

Anything else?

I don't suppose NTGH do private gender scanning?