Midwives are now running a service 24 hours a day, allowing hundreds more women to give birth at home each year.

The newmidwife service will help Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust reach its target of having 10% of births at home, or 48 a month – three times the current rate.

Previously, community midwives only covered homebirths until 5pm, with midwives from the maternity units at hospitals covering the evenings and nights. This led to difficulties in organising homebirths.

Now three dedicated community midwives are available during the day and two more are on duty at night.

The move followed a consultation with women and midwives where it emerged that some parents felt they were unable to choose a homebirth because they felt it would be difficult to free-up staff from the busy hospital to attend the birth.

The trust deals with more than 5,760 births every year.

Trustcommunity midwifery manager Mo Cleland said: “Homebirths for low-risk women have always been encouraged and supported but we knew the service we had was disjointed and needed to change.

“We would always prioritise attending homebirths but it was sometimes difficult to organise and if the labour ward was busy overnight then it was not always ideal to send a midwife out from the unit to attend a homebirth.

“We wanted to give families a real choice of place of birth and this new service enables us to do that and to be more responsive to the needs of the individuals.

“Our aim is to increase the number of homebirths in the trust area and this new service is key to being able to achieve this.”

The trust has between 14 and 21 homebirths a month on average and its homebirth rate is currently around 3.3% of all births.

Staff were called to deal with 28 homebirths in the first three weeks of the new 24-hour system.

NewmumVerity Willison was one of the first women to use the new service after giving birth to her son Ozzy at home in Brighton.

She said: “It was a top quality service and I felt utterly spoilt by having a midwife with me giving one-to-one care.”