“We can’t wait any longer. The baby has to be born today.”
The words that any soon-to-be-parents never expect to hear.
I was on my own at the hospital when I heard them. I remember calling my husband to tell him he was becoming a father, nearly seven weeks earlier than planned. Then another call to the boss. “Remember I said see you on Monday? Well, that’s not happening…”
48 hours or so later, post-emergency C-Section and with a near-death experience crisis averted, I remember standing as a new mum next to an incubator in a stuffy Special Care Baby Unit with my husband. That was in early 2014. Inside the incubator was our tiny scrap of a daughter, hooked up to all sorts of wires and with a feeding tube in her nose. I still have her hospital ID which went around her ankle – and I can fit it around my little finger.
One of the neonatal nurses was on the other side of the incubator, looking as reassuring as she could. Here’s how the conversation went:
“You two know how to change a nappy, right?”
“Errr… no?!”
Especially when doing so, at that point, involved navigating two ‘portholes’ in the incubator sides, not to mention a whole bunch of wires and a feeding tube. In my head, I remember thinking Does this *look* like the face of a person who knows how to change a nappy?
In reality, our ante-natal classes started two weeks after our daughter was born, so we had to ‘learn on the job’ as it were. This included changing nappies inside and outside of an incubator, learning how to feed through a tube, and so on. In our unit, the nurses expected and supported you to take on as much of your baby’s care as possible, so it became a crash course in parenting but with a whole bunch of medical ‘extras’ on top.
This is common for so many families whose children spend time on a neonatal unit. You get thrown into a world of beeps, alarms, machines and medical terminology, where temperature and weight measurements take over your life. Kangaroo care (or skin-to-skin contact, complete with wires and monitoring equipment) is where it’s at. When your baby fits into clothes for the first time, or when they finally make it to the 0.4th centile on the growth chart (that took us 6 months!), it’s a cause for huge celebration. (And yes, our daughter remains on the 0.4th centile, but is now aged nine!)
The thing is though, often women do the majority of this alone while their partner returns to work.
In our case, I spent the first three weeks of our daughter’s life at the hospital, sitting next to her incubator, and then her hot cot, for hours at a time, day after day. I was lucky – I got to ‘room in’ (live in the unit) for almost all of those three weeks and so I didn’t face the challenge of travelling to and from the unit every day to care for my child (all whilst recovering from major surgery) that many women have to go through. Being able to room in for that long is rarely possible, I remember the nurses telling me. But even so, the clock had started ticking on my maternity leave and every day spent in the hospital was a day less that I could have with her in the outside world. Yes, you do bond with your baby while you’re on the unit, and the staff work incredibly hard to help you do that, but it’s just not the same as in your own home.
My husband, however, had to choose what he was going to do with his time. Was he going to use up his two weeks paternity leave and sit with me next to that incubator? Or was he going to save it up and take his leave once she was discharged? He chose the latter and spent the next three weeks commuting from Buckinghamshire to London every day, then driving a 35-mile round trip every evening to visit us. Cue, one exhausted new Dad.
But the good news is that, as of the end of May, things changed for the 1 in 7 babies (and their families) that need neonatal care each year.
The Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Bill was first introduced as a Private Members’ Bill by Stuart McDonald MP and it received its first reading in June 2022. Thankfully, the Bill received wide cross-party support and finally, on 24th May 2023, it received Royal Assent and became law.
The new law means that new parents who fulfil the criteria will be offered up to 12 weeks of extra leave and pay to be with their babies if they are born too soon or are sick. Time on the neonatal unit will no longer eat into your maternity leave and new dads will not need to face the choice that my husband had.
The criteria to receive this new leave and pay are that:
- You meet the minimum service and earning requirements
- You are an employee
- Your baby is cared for in a health setting for more than one week before they reach 28 days of life
This will make a tremendous difference to families, like mine, who are already going through what can be a hugely traumatic experience. I wouldn’t have needed to spend the first weeks of my maternity leave in a hospital ward and my husband wouldn’t have needed to juggle a big commute, work and daily hospital visits. He would also have been able to be present all day, every day for the first few weeks of our daughter’s life, allowing us more time to bond as a family from day one.
But, sadly, the Act is only scheduled for implementation from April 2025, meaning that many thousands of families are still likely to lose out. There is an urgent need for this date to be brought forward.
Luckily, charities who support families of children in neonatal care like Bliss, are urging people to join their campaign for earlier implementation.
If you would like to add your voice to those calling for support for those 160 new parents per day who are expected to miss out on this vital support between now and the expected implementation of the new Act, you can do so by emailing your MP.
We were lucky that my daughter was discharged after three weeks, so less than a month of my maternity leave was spent in hospital. But other families are not so lucky. Adapting to be a new parent is hard enough, but being a new parent with a baby in hospital is even more challenging. Those additional (up to) 12 weeks will make such a difference.
About the author
This article was written by our newest team member, Anna Verghese.
Anna is founder of We Are Tabono Ltd, a company supporting women who are ready to take bold action to create thriving, successful businesses that they love, through business coaching, consultancy and training.