Choosing a hospital or home birth

Our aim is to help you make an informed decision about where you give birth, whether you'd like to give birth at home, or in one of our hospitals.

Giving birth at home

Due to current staffing pressures in our Maternity services, we’ve made the difficult decision to suspend our Home Birthing service at this time. The safety of mothers and babies remains our priority and we need to base midwives across our hospital sites to ensure we provide safe services to all women in our care. We are working hard to increase staffing numbers and plan to review the suspension of the Home Birth service in September 2023. We have recruited an additional 26 midwives who are planned to join the Trust in the summer/autumn of 2023. Over the coming months, this will improve our staffing position and, once they have been supported in their new roles, we will have additional midwives to care for our patients and will review whether it’s safe to restart the Home Birth service.

We recognise that this will be upsetting for women who have chosen to birth at home as their preferred option. Our midwives are contacting those women to discuss alternative options.

Giving birth In hospital

For low risk women we can offer the birth centre as an alternative to birthing at home.

Women who planned birth in a midwifery unit had fewer interventions, for example starting a drip, and were less likely to have a Caesarean section in labour (Birth Place Study 2014).

We recommend that women who need consultant care during their pregnancy have their baby in the maternity unit labour ward. You may live near more than one maternity unit. Please discuss this with your midwife, who will be able to give you information about the different units to help you to decide which one you would prefer to attend.

Your midwife will be able to give you information about the facilities available to you.

Find out more about choosing your birth location (opens in new window) >