Cultivating Eden: Midwives in Conversation about the Home Birth Team in Poole, Dorset

Abstract

Current conversations about home birth in the UK tend to refer to the Birth place study (Birthplace in England Collaborative Group [BECG] 2011) based on nearly 80,000 birthing women in England, of whom 18,000 planned to have a home birth. The researchers found that their results support the policy of offering a choice of where they give birth to healthy women, both to those having their first baby and those who have had previous pregnancies. In addition to offering choice, conversation around this potential choice will include the information that planned hospital birth is not any safer than planned home birth assisted by an experienced midwife with collaborative medical back up, but may actually lead to more interventions and more complications (Olsen and Clausen 2012). This paper recounts a conversation about the running of the Eden home birth team in Poole, Dorset. It was set up in April 2013 as a dedicated home birth team. We talked about the drivers, the initial set up, set-backs, learning points and the future.