Before your baby arrives
A prenatal consultation, with the clock switched off
An hour with an endorsed midwife, at home or by telehealth, to talk through how you are actually feeling about this pregnancy rather than only how it is measuring up.
What it is
A prenatal consultation: the conversation there is never time for
Your pregnancy appointments are, by necessity, efficient: blood pressure, measurements, results, next appointment. They are good at what they are for, and they are not built for the question you have been carrying around for a fortnight. A prenatal consultation with an endorsed midwife is that missing hour, at home or by telehealth. It is one of our pregnancy support services, and below is what people bring to it and who tends to book one.
There is no queue behind you, no clinic running late, and a midwife whose only job for the next sixty minutes is the pregnancy you are actually having.
It can be a one-off. Plenty of families book a single consultation, get what they needed, and carry on with their usual care unchanged. If you want the whole picture rather than one conversation, a private antenatal class covers more ground.
This does not replace your antenatal appointments, from the first prenatal consultation onwards. Your GP, hospital midwife or obstetrician continues to look after the clinical side of your pregnancy exactly as before.
What people bring to it
Whatever is actually on your mind
There is no agenda to work through. These are simply the things families bring to a prenatal consultation midwife, and they are the same things people mean when they search for first midwife appointment questions.
Making sense of it
- Something you were told at an appointment and did not fully follow
- A result or a scan finding you would like explained again, slowly
- The options in front of you, and what the trade-offs really are
- What to ask at your next appointment, and how to ask it
How you are going
- Anxiety about the birth, or about a previous one
- Feeling disconnected from a pregnancy everyone expects you to enjoy
- Planning for the first weeks at home, while there is still time to plan
- What support you have around you, and where the gaps are
Often people who are not in crisis at all
You do not need a problem to justify an hour. Plenty of people book one when their pregnancy is going entirely to plan and they simply want to understand it better.
The rest tend to be people carrying something specific: a difficult previous birth, a result that unsettled them, or the growing sense that they are meant to know more than they do.
Telehealth works well for this one
Unlike a postnatal visit, where a great deal comes from what a midwife can see in your house, a consultation is mostly a conversation. That makes it one of the few things that works just as well by video.
Ask the midwife you contact which she offers. Some of the four midwives do both, in person or as a midwife consultation by video.
Fees and Medicare
Each midwife sets her own fee for a prenatal consultation, and because all four are endorsed a Medicare rebate may apply for eligible families. What comes back depends on your own Medicare position, so ask her to set out the fee and the likely rebate together before you book.
Arrange a consultation
Book an hour with a midwife
Every midwife takes her own bookings and can tell you whether she offers consultations at home, by telehealth, or both.