You have a VE and they decide if you are to have a hormone pessary asserted in your cervix or not. Sometimes they are 24 hour pessaries, sometimes 4 hour pessaries depending on the state of your cervix. If you are fairly dilated at exam, they may opt to break your waters straight away. You are often encouraged to exercise as much as possible for an hour to get things moving, if you fail to progress at a rapid enough rate for the team, they will want to start a hormone drip to speed up the contractions. You are continually monitored with ctg normally (depends on trust policies, particularly and once hormone drips are started) so are pretty limited as to what you can do from an active labour point of view. Inductions tend to go one of two ways... either very well and you have a baby in a few hours or very long and painful. My induction resulted in a c section, which h's now massively affected my choices this time around. Baby was just not ready to come out and I am gutted that I wasn't more clued up about the induction process ahead of time. I would have never opted for induction without there being a medical reason for sake of baby's life. Technically you aren't overdue until 42 weeks, and even then, scans can be performed and movements monitored s that your placental function can be kept an eye on. There is actually limited information suggesting that 42 weeks is the cut off point for the placenta function, yet it is routinely used as an argument for induction.
You can read up the NICE guidelines which has clinical statistics from the use and success of induction.
