POSHEST PLACE TO PUSH
From a bronze cast of baby’s feet to lobster on silver platters, why the Portland (at £9,000 a time) is the...
FROM the outside, there is little to distinguish the Portland Hospital from its city centre neighbours.
A stone’s throw from central london’s Regent’s Park, the exterior walls of what is renowned as one of the world’s most exclusive hospitals are, frankly, a little drab.
But from meals served on silver platters and bottles of Bollinger to wet baby’s head, to super-deluxe VIP suites and luxury goodie bags, the service inside the deceptively bland exterior is positively luxurious.
And now it would seem the Portland, which specialises in catering to the needs of women and children, has played host to perhaps its most highprofile set of new parents yet – Meghan and Harry.
Some 1,600 women give birth at the hospital every year, paying anything from £9,000 for a straight-forward midwife-led birth and swift departure, through to tens of thousands of pounds for the consultant of their choice and an extended stay.
Among the star-studded, but diverse, roll-call of those to give birth in one of the 36 private rooms and suites are Victoria Beckham, Jools Oliver, Jerry Hall and Tana Ramsay, who gave birth to her fifth child at the age of 44 in April.
Meghan and Harry aren’t quite the first royal couple to avail themselves of the Portland’s services – Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew were ahead of them, with the birth of Princess Beatrice back in 1988. Princess Margaret’s children have both used its services and the hospital is a long-standing favourite with Middle Eastern royalty, who typically fly in by private jet.
As for Californian Meghan, she may well have been drawn to the hospital by its American heritage; it’s operated by HCA Healthcare, the HCA standing for Hospital Corporation of America.
THE hospital chain (it owns elite private london hospitals The lister, Princess Grace and Wellington) earns about a quarter of its sales in Britain from overseas visitors – particularly from Russia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait – and has a slick overseas marketing campaign.
The hospital has been marked by tragedy, most prominently the death in 1999 of laura Touche, 31, who opted to have a caesarean section to deliver her twins, but died of a brain haemorrhage nine days after giving birth. The hospital made an out-of-court settlement to her husband, and apologised for her death which was found to have been from natural causes contributed to by neglect. In 2014, footballer Jake livermore’s baby son suffocated at birth after mistakes were made during delivery.
The hospital, which says it has since tightened procedures considerably, has been rated ‘good’ by the Care Quality Commission.
So just what do new parents get from the Portland experience?
Expectant mums can opt to have all their ante-natal care at the hospital, from their first booking appointment and 12-week scan through to delivery and sixweek post-natal checks, which if
carried out solely by midwives costs £9,100. For that, mums get a 24-hour stay from the point of admission (push quickly, or the price goes up), as well as 24-hour room service, afternoon tea, complimentary photographs and post-natal physiotherapy.
If a consultant is needed during labour that’s an extra £4,500. Consultant-led care for the birth starts at £6,100, while epidurals are £995 and should the patient require induction (Meghan, as we know, was overdue), it costs £635.
A consultant-led package with planned C-section (they account for about half of all births, compared to a quarter in the NHS) costs in the region of £20,000. Fortunately one of the consultants, Shazia Malik, is known for ‘doing a good scar’. On a typical NHS maternity ward, once labour is out of the way, new mums have to share every joyful and sleepless moment with a line-up of frazzled neighbours, or hope there is a private room available. At the Portland, things are all together more restful; there’s even a bed for Daddy.
In 2016, a BBC2 documentary series, Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital, gave a revealing glimpse inside a hospital where a single additional night in the most basic room costs £1,250; more luxurious rooms costs £1,850 and suites, which feature a separate lounge area and en-suite bathrooms, come in at £2,250 – more than the price of a top suite at The Ritz.
The hospital employs a designated VIP liaison team and has secret entrances for its mostprized guests, which will have appealed to the Duke and Duchess, who have been keen to preserve their precious first moments with their new arrival.
The TV series showed one unnamed Saudi princess deploying her PA to make arrangements, along with an interior designer to get the rooms (four luxury suites to house herself, her baby, her family and her visitors) ready. Final bill? £250,000.
LITTlE wonder Portland CEO Janene Madden says: ‘It’s like having a holiday. After two to three days you leave fit and well.’
In NHS hospitals, the average spend on breakfast is 90p per head, and new mums look forward to the post-birth offer of a cup of tea and a slice of toast. At the Portland, meals are cooked to order with fresh fruit, pancakes or a hot breakfast, while dinners can include lobster and caviar. The hospital’s head of catering was poached from The Dorchester.
Meals are delivered by liveried staff carrying silver platters, a subject of some amusement online, where one Mumsnet user related her experiences.
‘The nurse called the kitchen, asking them to bring me cabbage (my breasts were engorged and painful),’ she wrote. ‘She asked them to just cut a savoy cabbage in half and bring it over. It arrived on a silver platter!’
Of course, it’s not just about the room service, or bottles of champagne in the in-room fridge. There are three operating theatres, a state-of-the-art neonatal intensive care unit and a four-cot special care baby unit and a team of 50 midwives, as well as 21 cleaners and nursery nurses who are happy to take care of the little
one’s every need – including nappy changes and bottle feeding. There’s even an aristocratic consultant, Dr Penelope Law, otherwise known as the Countess of Bradford.
There is very little the Portland hasn’t thought of, from yoga and hypnobirthing to private photographers to capture baby’s first moments and a service so parents can have silver or bronze casts of their new arrival’s hands and feet.
‘We have princesses from the Middle East who deliver here quite regularly. We have celebrities and individuals of very high net worth and they are used to getting what they want… As long as that woman or husband can pay for what they are requesting we will do our best to provide that,’ said Janene Madden in an interview.
In the BBC documentary, midwife Doreen spoke of her shock at some of the demands of mums. ‘They will ask you for things that you know they can do themselves – her glasses will be next to her and she will ask you to hand them to her – but that is the lifestyle they expect, so you just have to do it.’ While Meghan and Harry do not appear to have availed themselves of the Portland’s facilities for long, they will, like all parents, have been offered a luxury goodie bag on departure, which by last account includes upmarket toiletries, a bottle of Portland champagne – and a stuffed toy panda, called Portly Bear.
Among other women to give birth at the Portland, there was celebration that Meghan had joined the ‘Portland club’.
‘Great to see the new royal baby born at a great hospital such as Portland!’ said one Instagrammer. ‘This is where I delivered our third while living in England.
‘Though it was 30 minutes by train from our house, we were overjoyed with the level of service and care we received being so far away from home (US). We ended up having to stay a week but they made it feel like only days!’
‘I’m forever thankful to the amazing team at #theportlandhospital for always making my experience so memorable and treating me like royalty,’ wrote another.
Which, considering the practice they’ve had, shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.