The 6-Week check won't tell you if you're really recovering. This will.

You've made it to six weeks. Your baby is here, you're beginning to find a rhythm, and somewhere in the diary there is a GP appointment - the six-week postnatal check. It is, in theory, the moment the system pauses to ask how you are doing.

In practice, it often lasts less time than the journey to get there. A survey of over 4,000 women by NCT and Netmums found that nearly one in five six-week checks lasted under five minutes, 26% of women felt rushed, and almost a third were not asked about their emotional or mental health at all. 43% said their GP had no knowledge of their specific circumstances or birth history.¹ Healthwatch England, which analysed the experiences of nearly 2,700 new mothers, concluded that these checks are "frequently carried out as a tick-box exercise where mental health is not treated as a priority or not assessed at all."²

Physical health fares no better. The same appointment that misses your mental state is also not designed to assess your pelvic floor, your abdominal muscles, your scar tissue, or how your body is structurally recovering from birth. It is a brief screen, not a recovery plan.

None of this is the fault of the GPs, who are working within a system that does not give them the time. But it does mean that for many women, the six-week check functions more as an administrative close than a genuine assessment. You are signed off. The system moves on.

The question is: are you actually ready to be?

"No red flags" is not the same as feeling like yourself. Recovery - emotional and physical - has been quietly happening inside a body and a mind that were never formally assessed.

What the Fourth Trimester actually demands

The weeks after birth place enormous demands on a woman - and they do so across two distinct dimensions that are too often treated as one.

The first is emotional and practical. Research shows that the period between 10 and 19 days after birth carries a significantly heightened risk of maternal mental health difficulties - precisely the window when NHS support has already withdrawn.³ Beyond the clinical risk, there is the daily reality: a newborn who does not sleep predictably, feeding that may be painful or uncertain, a partner who is adapting to a role nobody fully prepared them for. These are not small things, and they do not resolve themselves because a midwife stopped visiting at day five.

The second is physical. Pregnancy and birth change the body in ways that take months to resolve - and some that require active intervention to address properly. The abdominal muscles separate to accommodate a growing baby. The pelvic floor bears extraordinary load across nine months and then the strain of birth itself. Wounds heal on the surface before they heal underneath. These changes are happening whether or not anyone is looking at them carefully.

Both dimensions matter. And each requires a different kind of expertise.

What Your Midwife Is There For

Our postnatal package is built on a straightforward principle: the fourth trimester deserves the same clinical attention as the nine months before it.

Your midwife - the same midwife that followed you in pregnancy - visits you at home across the first six weeks. She is there at hospital after delivered, when the world feels simultaneously enormous and very small. She is with you after you get discharged from hospital. She is back in the second week, when the initial adrenaline has worn off and the real adjustment begins. She continues weekly until week six, each visit unhurried, each one building on the last.

She covers the full breadth of what those weeks require. Clinically: blood pressure, wound healing, uterine involution, your baby's weight and development. Practically: feeding support whether you are breastfeeding, bottle feeding, or navigating a combination of both; sleep, settling, and the hundred small questions that arise when you are learning a new baby's language in real time. And emotionally: watching for the signs that something more than tiredness is at play - the low mood that does not lift, the anxiety that narrows your world, the feeling of not quite recognising yourself.

Because she has been with you since the beginning, she knows what your baseline looks like. She knows your feeding goals and your fears. She knows what you were worried about at 32 weeks. She can tell the difference between a woman who is tired and a woman who is struggling. She does not need to ask you to start from the beginning, because she was there.

She is also there for your partner. She helps them find their footing in a role that can feel overwhelming and underacknowledged, and making sure they have what they need to be genuinely useful rather than anxiously hovering.

This is what continuity of care looks like in practice. Not a different face at every appointment. Not having to explain your birth again to someone who has never met you. The same person, across the whole arc of the fourth trimester, with all the context that requires.

What the Physiotherapist Is There For

There is one dimension of postpartum recovery that falls outside the scope of midwifery care, however thorough: a specialist assessment of how your body has physically responded to pregnancy and birth at a structural level.

This is the work of a Women's Health Physiotherapist. And it is, for most women, something they either never access or stumble upon months later when a symptom has become impossible to ignore.

That is why we have incorporated a dedicated Postpartum MOT with a specialist Women's Health Physiotherapist into our postnatal package. It takes place at six weeks, the point at which your body has moved through the immediate aftermath of birth and is ready to be assessed properly.

Think of it as a full-body structural assessment after significant physical exertion. During the appointment, your physiotherapist will assess your pelvic floor, including any signs of weakness, heaviness, or leaking. She will examine your abdominal muscles for diastasis recti, the separation that occurs during pregnancy and which, left unaddressed, can affect everything from core strength to lower back pain.⁴ She will look at your posture and movement patterns as your body reorients itself. And if you have had a caesarean birth, she will assess your scar tissue and guide you through techniques to support its recovery.

These are not minor or cosmetic concerns. Stress urinary incontinence affects between 30 and 47% of women in the first year after birth.⁵ Research consistently links it to significant reductions in quality of life, reduced participation in physical activity, and higher rates of postnatal depression.⁶ Symptoms like leaking or heaviness after birth may be common, but common is not the same as inevitable, and it is not something to simply manage around. Pelvic floor muscle training, when properly supervised by a physiotherapist, is the first-line recommended treatment, and supervision matters: guided physiotherapy produces meaningfully better outcomes than unsupervised exercise alone.⁷

The assessment is about making sure nothing is missed that, left unaddressed, compounds over time. You will leave not with vague reassurance, but with a precise understanding of where you are and what your body needs.

Two Disciplines, One Handover

In France, postpartum pelvic floor physiotherapy has been prescribed to every woman after birth, funded by the state, since 1985. The principle behind it is simple: you do not wait for problems to become impossible to ignore before you look for them. Preventative, systematic care is not a luxury. It is just good medicine. The UK has never followed suit. This package is the closest thing to it.

That same logic runs through both disciplines we bring together here. Your midwife and your physiotherapist share the same purpose: to make sure nothing that could derail your recovery is missed, and that anything which needs attention is caught early enough.

Your midwife holds that role across the full arc of the fourth trimester. She supports your recovery and offer consistent guidance on feeding before difficulty becomes failure. She addresses the emotional weight of the fourth trimester before it becomes something heavier. She builds your confidence and your partner's, visit by visit, so that by the time she steps back, you are not just coping, you are thriving. And if anything gives her cause for concern, she escalates to make sure the right support reaches you before a complication has the chance to take hold. She is the person who knows your baseline well enough to act before you have to ask.

Your physiotherapist holds that same preventative role, but for your body. She is not there because something has gone wrong. She is there to assess what is happening structurally – the pelvic floor, the abdominal muscles, the scar tissue – before any of it has the chance to become a problem that is harder to address.

That is what joined-up care looks like. Two disciplines, one shared commitment to catching things early.

Ready for what comes next

The end of the fourth trimester should feel like something. Not just the quiet expiry of an appointment schedule, but a genuine moment of readiness: a clear sense of where you are physically, emotionally, and practically, and what you are walking into.

The end of the fourth trimester should feel like something - not just the quiet expiry of an appointment schedule, but a genuine moment of readiness.

That is what this package is designed to give you. Six weeks of continuous expert care from a midwife who knows you, followed by a thorough physical assessment from a specialist physio who can tell you with precision how your body is doing. And at the close of it, not a sign-off but a handover - from being cared for to feeling genuinely well.

Recovery is not a return to who you were before. It is finding your footing in who you are now, with a body that has done something extraordinary. We want to make sure you have everything you need to do that well.

If you'd like to talk through whether our postnatal package is right for you, we offer a free 20-minute conversation with no obligation. We're here when you're ready.

References

1. NCT & Netmums (2018). Survey of over 4,000 women on the six-week postnatal check. nct.org.uk ↩
2. Healthwatch England (2023). Six-week postnatal checks are failing many new mothers. healthwatch.co.uk ↩
3. Munk-Olsen, T. et al. (2006). New parents and mental disorders: a population-based register study. JAMA, 296(21), 2582-2589. ↩
4. Gluppe, S., Ellström Engh, M. & Bø, K. (2021). At 12 months postpartum, 33% of women exhibit clinically significant diastasis recti abdominis, associated with impaired quality of life, negative body image, and abdominal pain. Brazilian Journal of Physical Therapy, 25(6), 664-675. ↩
5. Pelvic floor training to prevent stress urinary incontinence: a systematic review. Actas Urológicas Españolas (2024). Prevalence of SUI in the postpartum period: 30-47% in the first 12 months. ↩
6. Pelvic floor muscle training with biofeedback for urinary and anal incontinence after childbirth - systematic review. BMC Women's Health (2023). Urinary incontinence is associated with significant reductions in health-related quality of life and with higher rates of postnatal depression in the first six months after birth. ↩
7. Diz-Teixeira, P. et al. (2023). Update on physiotherapy in postpartum urinary incontinence: a systematic review. Archivos Españoles de Urología, 76(1), 29-39. Pelvic floor muscle training is the first-line recommended treatment for postpartum urinary incontinence; supervised training produces better outcomes than unsupervised exercise alone. ↩