AIBU to think that all mothers should have food and water on postnatal wards?

Actually have breakfast brought to you instead of it appearing around the corner and no one down at the end of the ward knowing about it.

The link doesnt work?

Oh and having a nurse who wanders the ward and deals with mothers who just let their baby cry and moves the cots so they are within their curtain area, it's not massive but if your cot is in my area my area is even smaller.

An info card about how things works is a really good idea. It could do with being translated into common foreign languages too. I saw a woman getting fairly poor care recently because she couldn't speak English.

Food should be brought round on a trolley, instead of expecting women who are just hours post-csection to fetch their meals from the end of the corridor.

I had to beg for a DRINK post birth - I gave birth at 11 30pm on a Sunday so no chance of a shop open. I got some warm water at 5 00 am!

Meals should definitely be brought round to you at meal times. The aren't any other times when you are in pain, in hospital, expected to care for another person and fetch your own meals.
Consideration should be encouraged too. So phone calls in the day room only not on the ward. The bounty woman should have a room to take you to for the photos instead of disturbing everyone else on the ward. The ward outside of visiting times should be peaceful so people can rest.

Postnatal wards should ideally be run the same sort of way as other inpatient wards.

Food brought round on a trolley at mealtimes, along with a snack cart once or twice a day for patients and visitors to buy extras if they wish. Toast or sandwiches offered to patients who arrive at the ward at an awkward time and miss a meal.
Regular drinks rounds, at the very least each patient should have a large jug of iced water brought at each meal time.
An offer to help mum wash every morning and evening (either help getting to the showers, or bring a bowl of water and soap etc)
Not treating the mum as a nuisance if she rings her bell for help getting to the toilet, or extra pain relief, or advice for baby!

I remember these were the basics of care when I was an inpatient with my Crohn's. My SIL who has had various inpatient stays has had these as a minimum.

So why are things so different postnatally?

Meals brought round, or at least collected for you, c section so my mobility was limited and my dh wasn't allowed to collect. FRUIT! Seriously there was non! I was in for 5 days and had no fruit except what dh brought me after 3 days when it was all I craved because of the heat

My last birth, i was in for a few days before an planned induction and then few days after with complications...the nurses in my hospital were feeders, they loved to feed, constantly a supply of sandwiches in their fridge for patients who were up in the night, and the food was good, breast feeding and hungry, a machine for tea coffee and hot chocolate etc so always a supply, then still had the lovely old lady with the tea trolley. Always nurses about and always a doctor too, the pre natal didnt differ from postnatal

My first two births at a different hospital i got tea and toast but was literally in and out wuth those two, more of a conver belt effect

Ive heard horror stories of post natal wards from friends who used different hospitals, partners having to bring take aways in, and intervene and find nurses, and not helping mothers who are struggling to settle the baby or establish BF, or making those who are bottle feeding feel awful.

Some hospitals do need to improve post natal as i think that sets the tone for how a woman sees their birth experience, and a negative experience can potentionally have a negative long term effect

A card explaining how it works would be great. I had a homebirth but we were both unwell and were taken by ambulance to hospital straight after. I didn't have a clue what I was doing as I knew nothing about hospital protocol. I didn't know if you could leave your baby while you went to the toilet or whether you had to take it with you. Left alone in a room with no one to ask and after a few hours my bladder gave up and(mortifyingly)I wet the bed....still makes me sad to this day.

Something that always crops up when i talk to friends.

Mobile phones, people having loud conversations through the night etc, banning them at certain times and people playing movies etc.

Even though many women have undergone surgery and other medical procedures by the time they reach the postnatal ward, there is a culture that you're not ill so you don't need help, if you see what I mean. I got the distinct impression that despite the fact I was awaiting a blood tranfusion, was catheterised and hardly able to walk due to the pain from my tearing and stitches, all of those things were deemed not an issue because I'd given birth so it's just the way it is? Hope that makes sense.

I think the wards should be more cheerful. I know that cost is an issue but they're so grim. My Mother commented on it when she came to see DD2 and myself. She said "It's so serious and grim!"

I also think water by each bed should be the norm. A healthcare assistant once snapped at me HOURS after my section "The taps over there!"

When I'd asked for water....it was at the other end of a long ward! I was about 2 hours post op!

I don't think that food trollies should be brought to the ward bays in postnatal wards - the risk of burns to newborns is too great. Likewise with the snack cart idea, you already have many people telling you that they want privacy in these wards (even from new parents visiting their newborns).

I would like to see drinks fountains on the wards for fresh water and all women encouraged to bring in reusable water bottle - that way women can have a drink when needed and it's eco friendly. The risk is infection, so there would need to be a cleaning sink near the fountain.

I think all patients and visitors should have phones set to silence, but quiet conversations should be allowed if necessary.

I'd like to see antenatal physiotherapists around more often offering advice on post-baby exercise and nutritionists doing the same as well.

I'd get rid of those free rep people - they are horrific.

Tip God yes! I remember limping down the corridor for breakfast after my planned section! It was awful!

The post natal ward I was on had meals brought to us just like any other ward and it worked fine. It was the one and only thing that seemed to work well.

If the meals hadn't been brought to us I wouldn't have been able to eat at all as I honestly couldn't walk without help. And visitors weren't allowed to bring food or drinks to the ward (infection control ) so if I had been in a different hospital would I have been left without food for the six days I was in hospital? That's horrific.

Just run the wards for the benefit of new mothers and their babies.

So that's not for the benefit of fathers, extended family and friends. Have a visiting room by all means, but the bedside area should be for Mum's and Babies with fathers visiting during set hours.

Recognise that a women who has been in labour for 48 hours, then pushed a baby out of her Mary in the middle of the night, might be a little tired. She might not appreciate being woken up and shown how to bath her baby.

Recognise that the same new Mother might need more than one pillow to be comfortable and to breastfeed her baby.

A minimum of privacy on the ward would be nice - even the lady collecting up used crockery just whipped my curtain open without any preamble. At this particular instance I was boobs out, sobbing over the breast pump while I expressed for my baby in SCBU.

A card on how things operate in the unit would be helpful. It's just assumed you know.

I think there should be more restrictions on visitors - not on how long partners can stay but how many can stay for so long.

When I was on the postnatal ward, in a bay of 4, two women were allowed to have seven or eight people in at the same time, all day. This included about six children between them who of course palled up and ran up and down the ward yelling all day. The rest of the relatives seemed to treat it as a big social occasion, loudly talking to each other between the cubicles. Kids kept poking their heads through my curtains while I was trying to breastfeed. I had my chairs nicked while I was in the toilet!

The midwives were either too busy to try and control things or they weren't bothered - I sent my mum to complain and she just got shrugged at.

There was another situation a couple of days later when a new lady was brought in at about 11pm. Her partner was there, fine. But he was allowed to bring in his mum, dad, brother and granddad!! They all stood around the poor woman reminiscing about the partner when he was a baby - very loudly - and the midwife was still trying to do some kind of postnatal checks, the baby was literally only a couple of hours old. Didn't even try to eject them until the woman had a medical emergency and got rushed back to the HDU.

I don't know if these situations arise because midwives are cowed by the sheer number of people, or if they don't have time to be herding people out, or if they're just not bothered, but restrictions need to be a lot stricter when it comes to random relatives and they need to actually be enforced.

It's a cost issue isn't it - I think it's seen that there's not much point spending money on post-natal care because the baby's out, the hard/high risk work's done and all they're doing is keeping an eye on you - and it's giving birth isn't it, what did you expect? But I think that better post-natal care could save the NHS money in other areas - especially in treating PND/PTSD. Just judging from the posts on here, the number of women who've suffered genuinely medieval treatment on post-natal wards and been permanently mentally scarred by it seems to be astronomical.

I would have liked the staff to have a better bedside manner. I felt like I was treated like a naughty child getting in the way of what staff wanted to do. Most of the staff looked annoyed when I asked for help with trying to breast feed or asked them where the expressing machine was. I had to drag that up and down corridors 12 hours after a c section. My baby was prem and they gave conflicting and dangerous advice about feeding. The antenatal and labour ward care was very good but the postnatal care was awful.

Lots of fruit!
Drinking water tap on the ward instead of having to bother busy staff to get jugs filled.

I think they make you go and get your food to get you up and about which is important after a c section. When I had a section recently they brought me my first couple of meals then I had to get my own which was fine BUT if lunch time coincided with when the baby was being fed or something there was nothing left. I also had the problem of being veggie. They only did a few portions of veggie food and there wasn't enough to go round, this needs to be addressed.

Cups of tea/coffee for partners would be nice. After all they are helping to look after the mothers and babies.

The bathrooms need to be cleaned a lot more often - everyone who uses them is bleeding so they were pretty gross.