Bristol midwife launches new Postnatal Care business

A Bristol midwife has launched a new business to bring back “traditional midwifery values”. Laura Meredith-Hobbs, from Henleaze, believes more needs to be done to help new mums and has founded Postnatal Care, a service through which she hopes to provide families with support after birth.

Laura qualified in 2012 with a degree in midwifery from UWE and worked at North Bristol Trust as a community midwife for five years. However, she found increased pressures and workloads within the NHS made it difficult to deliver the care and support women need. “I loved my job,” she says tentatively, “but there’s massive restraints because of funding, so you’re not able to do your job as you really want to.”

Rather than allow her frustrations to grind her down, her entrepreneurial spirit turned into action and positivity. “Midwifery is my calling,” Laura says passionately. “I saw where the gap in the market was and I wanted to deliver excellent care again.”

Designed to supplement regular NHS care, one of the main selling points of the business, she feels, will be her time, offering home visits to new mums when it suits them. “I’ll be able to actively listen without thinking I need to go somewhere else, and be present for them.”

Laura says the best part of her business will be giving new mums enough time, with her full focus on them

A home visit will include maternal checks, baby checks and feeding support, be it breastfeeding, bottle or a combination. With three children herself, and plenty of life-experience behind her, Laura is quietly fierce in her defence of a mums finding their own way. “I really believe that women are capable of making their own choices about how they care for their baby,” she says. While her care will comply with Nursing Midwife Council guidelines, she is excited to offer a more holistic and bespoke type of care, and “to give open and honest advice, rather than being restricted”.

Another unique aspect of the service will be a night time emergency call out between 8pm and midnight. “If, during what I call the ‘witching hours’, you’ve had a baby constantly screaming, you can feel desperate and not know where to turn or what to do,” Laura says. In her experience, this can be a particularly difficult time emotionally for new mums, and hopes to be on hand to offer the “experienced hand-holding” that families need.

Laura says  she expects Postnatal Care to appeal particularly to the more mature, professional market. She says she sees Bristol as “a transient city”, where women are increasingly “finding themselves without their mums and feeling isolated without the support they need.” She has found professional women in particular can find the transition to parenting difficult: “Suddenly you have no control because the baby runs its own timeline; the mum has to go with the rhythm of the baby and that can be really difficult”.

As the interview winds up, Laura opens her bag of midwifery magic and an enormous pair of soft stretchy knickers emerge, which she gives women in the days after childbirth: ‘I love these pants,” she says with a wicked grin. Practical, kind and with a sense of humour, she is exactly the sort of person you would want to support you through your first steps as a new mum.

With cuts to funding, including the axing of bursaries for nurses and midwives, and the ever-building pressures on the NHS frontline workforce, it is perhaps unsurprising that people like her feel unable to sustain their roles within the current system. But Laura is not a politician: she is a midwife. As she puts it simply herself, “I just want to do my job”.

Services will cost £75 for a home visit, and £150 for an emergency call-out, within the Bristol area. For more information visit her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/laurapostnatalcare