Wales, United Kingdom: Leah Morantz

Health experience related to: childbirth

Training and empowering health workers to attend to evolving population health needs and preferences leads to improved trust and satisfaction with the health system.

I gave birth to my second son last year. He was born at home and that was a choice that I had made and worked very closely with the midwives in my maternity services unit to achieve. My first birth experience in a hospital was quite traumatic and that was central to my decision to have an undisturbed home birth the second time.

The Welsh Government decided some time ago that they wanted the maternity services units across Wales to improve home birth rates overall. Here in Cardiff and Vale, our Health Board put together a focused home birth team of 2 midwives who would serve as "ambassadors" for home birth and make sure that women were being supported if that was the choice they made. It was definitely a new way of working.

Prior to the introduction of this policy, pregnant women in the area who wanted to have a home birth were not always being supported in the right way, and I think that was because home birth wasn't sanctioned as openly as it might have been. So there was a situation where if you were a prospective mom and wanted a home birth, you might have a community midwife who was supportive of it or you might have one who wasn't. And that would potentially have an influence on whether you could have a home birth in the end. The Health Board made an active decision to promote home birth as a choice.

I think the real benefit to that comes from providing women with a choice of where they wish to give birth: in the midwifery unit, in the consultant unit or at home. Every woman should have the ability to decide what's right for her.

In my particular case, I had many of my antenatal appointments at my house. That was extremely valuable, because it helped me develop comfortable relationships with the midwives, who were seeing my home as the place where the baby's birth was going to happen.

Midwives are not just doing the role of a traditional midwife anymore. In today's context they have to look at the whole woman. They have to be able to help women with substance abuse problems and physical abuse problems, as well as with physical problems related to the pregnancy. Midwifery is more than the training that you get from a clinical perspective; I think it's a very holistic role and it's a very special role in the context of health care.

The 2 things that were most important to me were the feeling that I was listened to at every step of the way and that my wishes and the planning that I had put into the birth were being respected. At all times I was part of the decision-making process.

I received exactly the care that I wanted and that was right for me. The only improvement I would like to see is for the National Health Service to offer the same options to every woman who wants to have a home birth, and also to every woman who wants to have a birth in the hospital.