Please sign and share your experiences/stories! Let us parents be heard and listened to. 

Maternal and paternal mental health is a national issue in the UK. The policies and treatment of postpartum mothers and fathers in hospitals is crucial to their mental recovery from their birth experience.

Across the UK there is no consistency regarding the policies surrounding postpartum mothers and fathers especially when their newborns are admitted back into hospital after birth. This needs to change. 

My personal experience:

Day 5 postpartum, my baby boy was admitted back into hospital with high levels of bilirubin causing him to have jaundice. Jaundice is a 1 in 20 newborn issue that can occur in babies and both my children have had it. Now we went into Blackpool Victoria Hospital confident that we would smash the treatment as a family and my baby would recover well. Our first child had their jaundice treatment at Royal Preston Hospital, so this is the experience we were relaying off. 

The treatment process for jaundice was perfectly okay during our stay at the hospital and majority of the staff provided outstanding care and support to my family. However, the policy they have in place regarding only 1 support adult being allowed to stay with a child overnight was an element I did not agree with as a newly postpartum mother healing from child birth during the time my baby was being treated. When my first born was treated during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic it was allowed that my partner could stay with us as she was under 10 days old. This is a policy I can agree with but being made to feel isolated and unsupported overnight with a newborn is not a policy I can agree with and when I asked various members of staff from healthcare assistants, nurses to consultants, I was given the same answer - “it’s just policy and always been this way”. So my response to this? “Well it needs to change”. 

I have written a formal complaint to the hospitals PALs service and have that current process ongoing but I feel a petition can make us newly postpartum mothers and fathers be more seen and possibly widen this change to a national level rather than local for me. 

So please share and comment, don’t be afraid to name hospitals/trusts if you’ve suffered a bad experience! We need to share so we can be heard to hopefully implement a change for the future mothers and fathers who shouldn’t have to suffer at the hand of outdated and unrealistic policies. 

Thank you for reading.