\nWe went to an antenatal parent education class today, organised by the Royal London Hospital. I have to say it was a big disappointment.\n<\/p>\n
\nFirst problem: it took us 3 tries, on 3 different weekends, to even get to the class. The first time no teacher turned up and we gave up and went home after 15 minutes. The second time no teacher turned up, we chased around the hospital to find out what was going on, were told the class was cancelled because the midwives were all busy, and went home again.\n<\/p>\n
\nThis time a midwife did turn up to actually hold the class. But she was so disorganised, and her way of presenting so confused, that the class was almost useless.\n<\/p>\n
\nShe started by handing out a course plan with a list of topics. That course plan had nothing to do with the actual course. When she spoke, it was almost a stream-of-consciousness presentation: she might be talking about pain relief in labour, in 3 sentences segue into breastfeeding, then moments later be talking about how to raise children, and then back to labour again. Only when someone asked a specific question did she stay on topic for more than a few moments.\n<\/p>\n
\nOccasionally, when someone asked a question about something I felt informed about (I have been reading, after all) I was very tempted to answer the question myself because then they would at least have gotten a coherent answer. I believe some of the people there may have gone home more confused than they came. Of course, if they knew nothing at all, then this may have been more useful than nothing…\n<\/p>\n
\nThe course was supposed to take 6 hours. 4 hours after we’d started, the midwife obviously thought she had spoken enough and sent us home. Well, she did ask if there was anything more we wanted to hear about. But if we knew what we needed to know then we wouldn’t have been there, would we!\n<\/p>\n
\nI got the impression that someone had set up this class a while ago – written the course plan with suggested topics in a rational order – and then handed it over to other people to run. Maybe the original plan was put together by a consultant from somewhere, or just a midwife with some planning skills who later left. (The course seemed to be a few years old: many of the printouts and photocopied materials were dated around 2002). In any case, the materials appear to have been taken over and used by random people with no teaching or organisational skills whatsoever.\n<\/p>\n
\nMaybe the teachers are different on different weekends and we just had bad luck. But the hospital should know that. If the hospital sends someone with so little preparation and so little teaching aptitude to teach a class, they can’t take these classes very seriously. This seemed like a mixture of box-ticking (“each hospital shall provide antenatal classes”) and keeping the parents pacified, rather than an effort to actually provide information or knowledge.\n<\/p>\n
\nIt certainly explains why the antenatal classes by the NCT (National Childbirth Trust) are booked about half a year in advance (which is why we attended this one instead).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We went to an antenatal parent education class today, organised by the Royal London Hospital. I have to say it was a big disappointment. First problem: it took us 3 tries, on 3 different weekends, to even get to the class. The first time no teacher turned up and we gave up and went home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pregnant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}