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Important Covid Information

At Private Midwives, we’re committed to following all Covid guidelines and protecting you.

Should I have the vaccine when I am pregnant?

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has now advised that pregnant women are more at risk of severe COVID-19 disease. They are reminding pregnant women to have their COVID-19 vaccines as soon as possible. They should not delay vaccination until after they have given birth. This is to protect them and their babies. In the UK, over 100,000 pregnant women have been vaccinated mainly with Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and they have a good safety profile. These vaccines do not contain live coronavirus and cannot infect a pregnant woman or her unborn baby in the womb. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the preferred vaccines.

Vaccination is strongly recommended in pregnancy, but the decision whether to have the vaccine is your choice. You may find the following resources helpful:

Can I have the vaccine if I am breast feeding?

You cannot catch COVID-19 from the vaccines and cannot pass it to your baby through your breast milk. If you're breastfeeding, the vaccines you can have depends on your age:

  • if you're 40 or over, you can have any of the COVID-19 vaccines
  • if you're under 40 and do not have a health condition that increases your risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19, it's preferable for you to have the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine

The Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines are preferable in people under 40 because of an extremely rare blood clotting problem linked to the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.

How are Private Midwives protecting their clients?

Please read our COVID Strategy

As you may be aware, the NHS is facing up to 50% staff absence due to Covid. This is in part due to staff contracting Covid from patients they care for. This has led to restrictions on services, banning of visitors and birth partners in some hospitals and a multitude of hospitals cancelling services – be that face to face appointments or home birth services.

Our absence rate is less that 5%. We do not ask you to wear a mask, but our midwives do wear PPE to protect our clients during appointments. We believe, when our midwives are in your home for long periods of time -typically 1-2hrs per visit, it is important for the safety of you, our staff and our other clients that we have assurance that no-one is passing on the virus. The tests are freely available, free of charge, so we believe this small inconvenience is a small price to pay. In addition, we limit the number of clients our midwives see. Typically they are only visiting two families each day. This reduces the chance of passing the virus between people.

We have been able to continue to provide our service and for the past 21 months. Our approach has developed and evolved over time and it has worked extremely well for us. We have never cancelled any services to date. Our priority is the safety of all of our staff and all of our clients. We are saddened to read that for you, this is something you are not prepared to do and so we will not be providing your care.

Are all Private Midwives vaccinated?

At Private Midwives, we fully support informed choice. That is choice for you as our client, choice for the people who work with us, and choice for the organisation.

Related Documents

We would recommend all potential and existing customers to read the following documents and guidelines:

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