HEDI - The Initial Meeting With Your Midwife

Congratulations, you've found a midwife and your first meeting is coming up. They will be a great help to you during pregnancy, birth and the time after. The initial meeting is for you to get to know each other and find out if you can trust each other. Bring your health insurance card and your maternity record (Mutterpass) to your first meeting. This way the midwife can see the results of all the check-ups your doctor has carried out since the beginning of your pregnancy. You probably have a lot of questions about pregnancy, childbirth and the early postpartum period floating around in your head. You'll be able to clarify some of this in the initial meeting. The meeting lasts about an hour.

Important topics in the first meeting

During the initial meeting you will discuss how much support and help the midwife can offer you and how many appointments will be covered by your health insurance. Also, which services are usually covered by insurance and which you have to pay for privately, if you are interested. You can then decide which appointments you would like to make in the next few months. Together you will also discuss what the midwife can do for you in the context of pregnancy counselling, birth preparation and postpartum care. The midwife will also tell you how much an appointment with them will cost if you want to take more hours than health insurance usually approves. During the conversation, the midwife will probably ask you how you are doing, if you are happy and relaxed or if you have any worries. The midwife will probably also want to know if you have any health problems and how much support you have from your family or partner. You will talk about whether you want to deliver your baby in a hospital or birth centre or at home. You can also take this opportunity to ask your midwife if they work with a particular birth centre or hospital.

Other possible questions to ask your midwife

Many pregnant people want to know what their midwife specialises in and what support they can offer beyond the usual activities. This includes, for example, whether this midwife also offers birth preparation and postnatal classes or whether they are familiar with natural remedies, yoga or meditation. It is also useful to know whether the midwife works in a midwifery practice, whether you can reach them outside your appointments and whether they have a substitute if necessary. Depending on your personal situation and what is important to you, you can find out from the midwife whether they also work with high-risk pregnancies, what they think about c-section deliveries, and what they think is important when it comes to breastfeeding. If these issues are important to you, it's good to do a little research before the first meeting.

This is how things go after the initial meeting

If the initial meeting goes well and you have decided on your midwife, they will explain what to do next. This can be, for example, registering for a childbirth preparation course at the hospital or at birth centre. In any case, you will make your next appointment. If the initial consultation with the midwife did not go as you would have liked, you can of course think it over. It’s possible that the first midwife you meet might not be the right fit. Many pregnant people meet several midwives before they find the right one for them. However, health insurance companies only reimburse the cost of an initial meeting once. If you want to have several initial meetings with different midwives, you will have to cover the additional costs yourself.

The Initial Meeting With Your Midwife

Important topics in the first meeting

Other possible questions to ask your midwife

This is how things go after the initial meeting

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