My Blog

Have you come across the Make Birth Better campaign yet? Started by clinical psychologist Dr Emma Svanberg during Birth Trauma Awareness week 2017, the campaign is now growing and Emma is looking for your help!

The Make Birth Better campaign grew out of a post Emma created on Instagram about the difference between PND and PTSD after birth. She was really floored by the response she got from women, who wrote to her saying they felt they were traumatised by their births and had no idea that this was possible.

She then invited women to send their birth stories, and she received over 75 during that week. Emma analysed these to pull out the key themes which women felt had influenced their experience. These are summarised at www.makebirthbetter.org. The themes included the physical impact of birth, the (positive and negative) influence of individuals including professionals and birth partners, the culture of secrecy around birth trauma, the far-reaching impact of trauma and women’s own ideas about how to improve birth.

Many of the themes demonstrated how small changes could make an enormous difference to women and their partners – such as a greater emphasis on different possible outcomes of birth and mental health awareness during antenatal education, the language used during labour, support in the immediate post natal period (and beyond), easy access to help and greater acknowledgement of the impact birth trauma societally.

Emma is currently focusing on improving access to help – there are many services around the country working to support women and their partners after birth but they can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look. With this in mind, Emma is creating a map of all the services which exist around the country and is then hoping to publicise this once it is more complete. She is looking for primary and secondary care mental health services, Birth Reflections services, any other related NHS therapeutic services (such as neonatal psychology). Outside of the NHS, she is also hoping to collect information on charities, voluntary organisations, private individuals and clinics who work to support families in the postnatal period. So far there are over 130 services listed but there are hundreds more!

Emma is asking for help in completing this part of the campaign. If everyone reading looked up a local service and added it to the map, we could fill the UK before spring is over!

If you know of local services, you can add them to the map by filling in the form linked at www.makebirthbetter.org/gethelp

If anyone has any web developer skills and would like to help Emma make the map more user-friendly then please do let her know!

Emma is also welcoming feedback on the site, and is aiming to make it a collaborative effort so do let her know if there’s anything you’d like to see added. You can email her directly at mumologist@gmail.com

This weekend, you may have seen the episode of  BBC’s Call the Midwife featuring the case of a lady with tokophobia, fear of birth.  If this is something you would like to know more about, please see this article published in The Independent this week by the excellent research team at the University of Hull.

Elaine 🙂