A decade since Chichester hospital opened its maternity suite

Mums-to-be have more choice over how they give birth thanks to a state-of-the art maternity and neo-natal unit which opened at St Richard’s Hospital ten years ago.
C100273-4 JPOS Dr Miriam Stoppard opens the newly refurbished maternity and neonatal unit at St Richard's Hospital.C100273-4 JPOS Dr Miriam Stoppard opens the newly refurbished maternity and neonatal unit at St Richard's Hospital.
C100273-4 JPOS Dr Miriam Stoppard opens the newly refurbished maternity and neonatal unit at St Richard's Hospital.

The £2million unit was opened by writer and broadcaster Dr Miriam Stoppard, who praised staff for their progressive approach to maternity services which focuses on tailoring care to meet the needs of women and their babies.

The new facility featured three birthing pools, a high-tech operating theatre with a high dependency recovery area and a special care baby unit. The aim of the birthing centre was to give mothers-to be the option of having a midwife led service in a home-from-home environment.

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The award-winning service gave fathers and partners a better opportunity to support mothers-to-be and bond with their newly born babies.

Dr Miriam Stoppard praised the unit for its partnership between clinical staff and midwives and said the support and encouragement of medics was very important. She also praised staff for their patience in working around the construction work and congratulated the unit’s focus on fathers.

She said: “Everyone has made a superhuman effort and I would like to congratulate everyone for being so selfless, it did require a great deal of altruism. Mums need dads, babies certainly need dads. If you look at the research and see the outcomes through children’s lives, hands-on active dads from birth onwards can make such a difference to what happens to children – especially boys – in terms of scholastic achievement, in terms of successful relationships, success in choosing partners, success in setting up their own family, so we can’t encourage dads enough. I think that work you are doing with dads is really first rate.”