THE team of community midwives working from Stratton Health Centre have been on a mission to improve their work environment and give local women enhanced care.  

Chi Kernow are a team of seven midwives and two maternity support workers based in Bude and Launceston. Their purpose is to offer continuity of carer to women and their families throughout their pregnancy and birth experience and beyond.

The Bude team members, midwives Heli Hakala and Claire Miles and maternity support worker Becky Blenkinsopp, are all fairly recent newcomers to the team.

They have invested a great deal of our own time and money to decorate their individual clinic rooms and latterly, with financial support from Stratton Hospital League of Friends, they have refurbished an unused office space to provide a comfortable space to offer support to new mothers. This space will also be available to a range of other support groups once COVID restrictions are eased but for now offers the team a quiet area to have breaks from their busy work days.

On behalf of the team, Claire said: “We were really aware that with the current COVID restrictions in place we had to limit the amount of home visits we could do and so it was important for us to be able to offer a safe and comfortable place for our ‘mums to be’ to be seen. Initially we decided to freshen up our own individual clinic rooms to make them brighter and fresher by painting and decorating them.

“This gave us the idea that we could develop a useful space within an unused office which could be used for breastfeeding support, counselling and as a staff rest area. We approached the League of Friends of Stratton Hospital for financial support to furnish the room and were extremely grateful to receive a grant to cover this. Many hours of painting, cleaning and refurbishment have now been finished (at our own cost and in our own time) and we are proud that we have achieved our goals.

“We have named the room ‘Magereth’ which is the Cornish word for ‘nurture’ and we hope that we will be able to use this space to give the best care possible.”

Claire added: “We are very proud of our achievements and would like to share them with the local community and also publicly thank the League of Friends for making it possible to furnish the room.”

If any of the Chi Kernow team’s mothers would like to send a baby photograph they would be delighted to add it to a display within ‘Magereth’ to celebrate all of their families.