Maternity

The information here will cover all aspects of the services we offer, including pregnancy, birth and postnatal care, both in the hospital and community.

Visiting / opening times

  • Seven days a week 08:00 AM — 08:00 AM

If you have any urgent pregnancy concerns please continue to call our 24 hour triage service on 01302 642711/2 (you can also call 07483 985107 or 07483 985210).

What’s on this page:

Are you pregnant?

If you’ve had a positive pregnancy test, register as soon as possible at mypregnancynotes.com. Your details will be sent to the maternity team, and a midwife will contact you within two weeks to arrange your first appointment.

If you’ve used the site before, log in and select “new pregnancy” to complete a new form.

If you can’t register online, call 01302 642814 and the team will refer you.

We provide care for women and families to help achieve a positive transition from conception to parenthood. The maternity team is committed to helping all women to have a happy and healthy pregnancy and a safe birth of their baby. The service runs smoothly from the community to the hospital to meet the individual needs of women and their families. We aim to support all women to make informed decisions about what they want and need from their maternity care whilst also ensuring a positive maternity experience.

The Trust has two maternity units, each providing midwifery led care, with the option of a home birth service for low risk women. Please ask a community midwife about the option of a home birth and she will be pleased to discuss this in detail with you. ‘Maternity Team Care’ with a consultant obstetrician for women needing additional care is also available.

Antenatal care is provided in the community setting, in GP surgeries, at home or in one of the four hospitals:

  • Women’s and Children’s Hospital at Doncaster Royal Infirmary
  • Bassetlaw Hospital
  • Montagu Hospital in Mexborough
  • Retford Hospital

Individuals can choose to book their pregnancy at either Doncaster Royal Infirmary’s Women’s and Children’s Hospital or at Bassetlaw Hospital. There are no birthing facilities at Montagu Hospital or Retford Hospital.

Translation services

If English is not your first language, you are entitled to an interpreter free of charge. Our trained interpreters can help you either in person, on the telephone or via a video call.

What is said will be kept confidential and will help you to understand what the doctors and midwives and other staff are saying, including any medical terms. Using an interpreter means that you can:

  • Tell us what you are feeling and what you need
  • Let us know when it hard to understand and if the treatment and care may not be right for you
  • Ensure you get the choices you want.

If you are not happy with the interpreter provided, please let those providing your healthcare know.

You may want a family or friend for simple tasks, such as making appointment but for any medical appointments, it may not be appropriate because:

  • They may not understand all that is being said
  • They might feel upset by some things or feel embarrassed, leading to information not interpreted correctly to avoid embarrassment
  • Some things may be confidential and need to be discussed in private with just you.

If you wish your family or friend to interpret, you will need to ask for this. Our team will check first with you through an interpreter.

Please be aware that we cannot allow children under 16 to interpret unless an extreme emergency as children can become anxious and stressed when given this responsibility.

Other translation services

To view the website in an alternative language, please select the language toggle button found at the bottom right area on any page on our website.

The language toggle button looks like this:

language toggle button

For another, unlisted language, please either head to Google Translate or request an alternative language within the language toggle button by emailing: dbth.comms@nhs.net or call: 01302 644244 Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.

See a midwife before 10 weeks

Early care gives you support, checks your health and your baby’s health, and makes sure you’re on the right treatment. Doing so will mean you can benefit from:

  • The right information and support
  • Health screening for any infections
  • Arrange any additional investigations
  • Start beneficial treatments
  • Stop medications unsafe in pregnancy
  • Receive regular screening for your baby

Self referral 

If you are unable to complete the self-referral on mypregnancynotes, you can call the maternity records department on: 01302 642814. They will complete the referral on your behalf.

Recording your ethnicity

We ask everyone attending our service their ethnicity, as it helps us to:

  • Reduce health inequalities
  • Plan your care (some conditions are linked to ethnicities)
  • Improve services and understand health outcomes for certain populations
  • Provide culturally sensitive care.

Your information is kept confidential, only those authorised to do so will see your medical records.

Your appointment

You can check, book, and manage your hospital appointments quickly and securely using the NHS App. This includes viewing referral letters, test results, and other useful information about your care. To find out more, visit our NHS App page.

While you’re waiting to be seen, it’s important to look after your health and wellbeing. Our Waiting Well page has advice and support to help you stay well, including guidance on what to do if your symptoms change or you start to feel worse.

Visiting times

At DBTH, we have an open and flexible visiting policy across our wards and departments, guided by our Visitor’s Charter. Find out more about visiting times here.

Parent Education Programme

We welcome women, partners, birth partners, family and grandparents at all of our classes.  The classes are free and include a wide range of topics including birth, life after birth, feeding your baby, fourth trimester, introduction to hypnobirthing, induction of labour, vaginal birth after caesarean and multiple birth.

Find out more information on what is available or book on a course here.

Maternity and Neonatal Independent Senior Advocate

Supporting you after a distressing experience (an adverse outcome) during your maternity and/or neonatal care.

If you had your maternity and/or neonatal care in South Yorkshire or Bassetlaw, who is your Maternity and Neonatal Independent Senior Advocate (MNISA)?

Abbey Harris

Who can Abbey support?

  • Abbey might be able to support you if:
    • your baby died before or during labour, after more than 24 weeks of pregnancy (known as stillbirth).
    • your baby died within 28 days of being born.
    • the person who gave birth died.
    • you had a hysterectomy (your womb was removed) within 6 weeks of giving birth, and you did not expect this to happen.
    • you were cared for on the Intensive Care Unit or High Dependency Unit, and you did not expect this to happen.
    • you were told your baby has or might have a brain injury.
  • It doesn’t matter if this happened recently or some time ago.
  • You don’t need to be sure that something went wrong during the care of you or your loved one.
  • Abbey will help make sure your voice is heard. She will make sure that you are supported.
  • You don’t have to use Abbey’s service if you don’t want to, and you can stop contact with Abbey at any time without giving a reason.

How you can contact Abbey:

Abbey’s service is free. She can arrange for an interpreter if needed.

Call or text 07811 796494

Email syicb.advocate@nhs.net

You can also speak to any health care worker involved in your maternity or neonatal care. They can ask Abbey to contact you.

Abbey can support you by:

  • finding the best people for you to speak to about your experience. She can come to meetings with you.
  • explaining ways you can find out more about what happened during your care.
  • helping you to make sense of how hospitals might look at what happened.
  • helping you to tell someone you are unhappy about your care, and/or that you want to ask more questions.
  • finding more support for you if you need it.

Abbey can give you information about other services if she thinks they are better placed to help you.

Will Abbey tell other people what you say?

  • What you choose to tell Abbey is confidential. This means she won’t share what you say to her with anyone else unless you say she can.
  • If Abbey is worried about your safety, or someone else’s safety, she would have to tell someone what you shared with her. Even then, Abbey would talk about this with you first.
  • Sometimes, one of Abbey’s team might help her to check if there are any messages from you that she needs to reply to. This person must follow the same rules as Abbey does around sharing your information.

More about Maternity and Neonatal Independent Senior Advocates (MNISAs)

  • Abbey does not work for any of the hospitals in South Yorkshire or Bassetlaw. This means she is independent of them. Abbey works for the NHS South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (SY ICB). They are in charge of all care which happens in your area.
  • The MNISA role is part of a new plan across England which will run until March 2025. After this, the NHS will look at whether the plan has been helpful to those who have had distressing experiences during their maternity and/or neonatal care.
  • If Abbey is still supporting you in March 2025, she will work out a new plan with you and her team. They will make sure you carry on getting the support you need.
  • The plan to introduce MNISAs was put into place because of important reports (like the Ockenden Review) in some parts of England. These reports show that those who had distressing experiences in their maternity and/or neonatal care in the past were not always heard. Care did not always get better, and this needs to change.

What happens if you are unhappy with the MNISA service?

    • If you are unhappy with the support Abbey has provided or with the MNISA service, you can speak to someone about this or make a complaint by sending an email to: syicb-sheffield.icbcomplaints@nhs.net

For more information, visit the South Yorkshire Maternity and Neonatal Independent Senior Advocate website.

Further support

Follow Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospital’s Maternity Services Facebook page, which is administrated by qualified Midwives at the Trust.

Maternity services performance

If you would like to see more information about births at any hospital, you can find out on the Which website. You can also find information on the standards of quality and safety at any hospital by visiting the Care Quality Commission (CQC) website.

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