Night sky relaxing view for new mums

By MARTIN JOHNSTON

Women in labour at a new Auckland birth unit will be able to gaze up at a miniature Southern Cross while lying back in a warm pool.

Two of the delivery rooms in the new, $7.2 million unit at North Shore Hospital are equipped with 1m-deep pools and darkened ceilings dotted with tiny, twinkling lights representing the night sky.

Hospital staff hope it will prove a therapeutic setting to help women cope with labour pains.

"We wanted a night theme, a spa-pool setting [without the bubbles], sitting back, relaxing," maternity services manager Barry Twydle said yesterday.

"It's so boring sitting in an ordinary room with traditional white. It will be very nice to have that difference," said Mr Twydle, who was the country's first male midwife.

He acknowledged the controversy over the safety of water births, which he said were only for low-risk deliveries and where the lead health worker had experience.

The unit, which will take patients from June 11, has been built to cope with North Shore and Rodney's rapidly growing population, to bring some services closer for patients, and to replace outdated facilities.

The Waitemata District Health Board is now numerically the country's largest, with a catchment of 430,000 people, including Waitakere City. North Shore Hospital had a record 3053 births last year.

The new unit is part of the $120 million upgrade and expansion of North Shore and Waitakere Hospitals.

Its post-natal ward has 26 beds, of which 14 are in single rooms with their own or shared en-suite bathrooms. There is also a four-bed day assessment room, which keeps bed-numbers at 30.

A 12-cot special-care baby unit has been built and is intended to open next year.

It will cater for about 200 babies a year, most of them born prematurely, who would otherwise be sent to National Women's Hospital.

The most-premature babies and the sickest will still go there.

The hospital also hopes to stem the flow of post-natal patients to the privately owned Birthcare, which charges $221 a night. (The user-pays Cornwall Suite at National Women's charges $197.50.)

Mr Twydle said the number of post-natal patient-nights at his hospital dropped by 40 per cent after Birthcare opened a 10-bed North Shore unit in March last year.

"Our whole market strategy is about competing and attracting women to use our facility." He added that women should not have to pay for their post-natal stay.

He said the new facilities equalled anything in the private sector, but the hospital was still trying to improve its meals.

Birthcare's managing director, Lee Mathias, said its competitive advantage was in its "huge emphasis on breast-feeding and confidence with parenting" and its "hotel" facilities.

nzherald.co.nz/health