Step 5

We provide you with a birth environment that works with your hormones to bring about faster and more straightforward progress.

Safe, secure, comfortable, relaxed, gentle, caring, personal and friendly – some of the words used by women who have given birth in Angus to describe their experience.

We encourage you to move and walk around during labour, and to give birth in the most comfortable place and position for you. An active birth helps your body to prepare itself, reduces pain and encourages your baby to move in the right direction.

Encouraging you to be active isn’t enough – you need props to help you too. 

The Montrose Community Maternity Unit has a birthing pool, birthing floor mattress, birthing balls, Parker-Knoll chair, warm towels, beanbags and access to a wide window-sill which is at the correct height for women to lean forward on. The planned new Maternity Unit in Montrose will have further facilities for active birth such as bars and ropes.

The Arbroath unit also uses all available furniture and features to support women's choices for active birth: birthing pool, warm towels, CD player / radio for chosen music / words, plenty of room to walk about, physio mats for use as birth mats, a birth ball, beanbags, a birthing bed at variable heights for support for leaning and standing, small stools for squatting, pushing and to get the baby in the best position for birth, and a Parker-Knoll chair.
 
We listen intermittently to your baby’s heartbeat during your labour and you are not strapped to a monitor without a good reason. For more information on heart rate monitoring in labour see the MIDIRS Informed Choice leaflet number 2.