Preventing premature births

At your booking appointment, we will assess you to see if there is a chance you might have an early, or pre-term, birth. This helps our team monitor you and your baby throughout your pregnancy.

If you’re at risk of having a pre-term birth, we may refer you to our pre-term birth prevention clinic.

At this clinic, a doctor will talk to you about:

• your options
• how we can best prevent pre-term birth.

Checking for pre-eclampsia

We will also ask you to give a urine sample at your booking appointment and at each of your antenatal appointments. We use this sample to check if you:

• have an infection
• are developing a condition called pre-eclampsia, which can lead to a pre-term birth.

If you do have risk factors for pre-eclampsia, we may advise you to take aspirin, which can help reduce the risk of fully developing this condition.

Early labour

It’s important that you give birth in a hospital if you go into labour earlier than 37 weeks.

If your labour starts before 34 weeks, we may offer you antenatal steroid injections to help your baby’s lungs grow.