Midwives launch Harrogate district support service with drop-in session for ‘covid parents’

Two former hospital midwives are inviting families who had a baby during the covid pandemic to an event this weekend.

Sue Oxendale and Jane Bamford have set up social enterprise Taking Baby Steps to offer extra support with issues including anxiety during pregnancy, birth trauma, and baby loss.

The pair encountered many parents facing those challenges during their combined 35 years as midwives at Harrogate District Hospital.

Sue said the issues were exacerbated in 2020 and 2021, when many women had to give birth and go through the early days of parenthood with much less support from their families than would usually be possible.

She told the Stray Ferret:

“Becoming a parent now can be really isolating. That can create anxiety in itself.

“When I had my kids, it was all church-based, community centres and coffee mornings. Things like that have become less and less.

“If we can start setting up networks of mums and a dads’ group, it all helps.”

Sue and Jane left their hospital roles last year to set up Taking Baby Steps and were given several grants, including £10,000 from the National Lottery, to fund their work.

They have begun to work with parents looking for more support than is available through the NHS and the funding enable families on low income to access their help.

The pair will also offer support to NHS professionals and students to help them deal with the challenges they may face while supporting patients.

Read more:

Having trained after her three sons were born, Sue became a specialist bereavement midwife while she was at Harrogate District Hospital. She said:

“I loved my job working on delivery suite, helping couples become parents and bringing new life in to the world, but I was always drawn to improving care for women and their partners who weren’t going home with a baby in their arms.

“I knew we only had one chance to get the care right when looking after families who had suffered a miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death or sadly made the painful decision to not continue with the pregnancy if there were complications affecting their baby’s development.”

Meanwhile Jane, along with her husband, experienced her own struggles with infertility and unsuccessful IVF, before adopting two children.

Those experiences influenced her work at the hospital, she said, and led her to take an interest in issues relating to fertility, trauma and anxiety. She said:

“I realised that there were a lot of women who were also struggling with their emotional health and wellbeing in areas such as perinatal anxiety, tokophobia [fear of pregnancy] and birth trauma.

“I also had conversations with couples who had experienced years of fertility treatment and then had become pregnant but felt that there wasn’t a recognition during their pregnancy of the journey and potential trauma they had already been through to get to this point.

“I began doing the appointments that were held at Harrogate Hospital named ‘pregnancy and birth revisited’, where a lady and her partner have the opportunity to return and discuss her birth experience in more detail. During these appointments I also began to appreciate the impact these experiences had on the birth partner also.

“Whilst it may seem obvious that they are affected I saw that they could be experiencing symptoms of trauma, affecting their day to day life.”

Tomorrow’s event will focus particularly on families who have been affected by the covid pandemic.

From giving birth without their chosen birth partners to missing out on the support of wider family and other parents during the baby’s early weeks and months, Sue and Jane believe there has been a significant impact on new parents’ experiences and their feelings about the beginning of their parenthood.

The drop-in session will bring together parents to chat about their experiences and find mutual support.

It takes place tomorrow at Chain Lane Community Hub in Knaresborough, from 9.30am to 11.30am. Tea, coffee and cake will be on offer, and anyone is welcome to call in during that time.