What’s Midwifery?
Midwifery is proficient, educated, and compassionate care for childbearing women, newborn babies, and families throughout the pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and the early weeks of life.
Core characteristics include optimizing normal biological, emotional, social, and cultural processes of reproduction and early life; timely prevention and management of complexities; consultation with and referral to other services; respect to women’s individual conditions and perspectives. And working in partnership with to reinforce women’s own capacities to care for themselves and their families.
Who’s a Midwife?
A midwife is a person who, having been often granted to a midwifery training program, duly recognized in the nation where it is located, has successfully completed the prescribed course of studies in midwifery and has got the requisite qualifications to be registered and/or lawfully licensed to practice midwifery.
Who’s a Skilled Birth Attendant?
A skilled birth attendant is a licensed health professional — like a doctor, midwife, or nurse — who was educated and trained to proficient in the skills required to handle normal pregnancies, childbirth, and the immediate postnatal phase, and in the management, identification, and referral of complications in women and newborns.
The Pros For Midwifery:
The possibility of midwives for enhancing the quality of care 83 percent of all stillbirths, maternal deaths, and newborn deaths could be prevented with the full package of midwifery care (including family planning);
62 percent of successful practices within the scope of midwifery reveal the importance of optimizing the normal procedures of childbirth and early life and enabling girls to take care of themselves and their families;
56 maternal and neonatal results were found to be enhanced through midwifery philosophy and practice of care;
87 percent of service demand can be delivered by midwives when trained to international standards;
82% decrease in maternal mortality potential with universal midwifery policy;
Midwifery is related to more efficient utilization of resources and improved results when supplied by educated, trained, licensed, and regulated midwives in global standards. Midwifery is a ‘best buy’ investment;
Midwifery is associated with decreased maternal and neonatal morbidity, decreased interventions in labor, enhanced psycho-social results, and increased contraceptive use and birth spacing
Community-based midwives have been found to rank favorably for economy, efficiency, and effectiveness;
Midwifery ought to be considered a core component of universal health care. Quality midwifery care is essential to achieving national and international priorities and securing the rights of women and newborn babies;
Quality relates to the right for teens and women to the maximum standard of health and is interchangeable with women-centered care. Providing quality care is most effective through midwifery care for all childbearing women;
There were no adverse effects associated with midwife-led care but important advantages, so it is suggested that all women should be provided midwife-driven continuity models of care;
Midwives can provide excellent quality of care, but socio-cultural, professional, and economic barriers have to be overcome to practice to their full potential.
Case loading midwifery care is safe and cost-effective.
What’s The Work Really Like?
Midwives may say that TV documentaries such as “One Born Every Minute” are a more realistic depiction of giving birth than a soap opera. Still, they don’t necessarily show the truly hard work that midwives carry out 24 hours per day. As a midwife, no two days are exactly the same, and it is unlikely that they’ll work a normal 9-5 day, often working outside their hours to get a mother to give birth to her baby. Midwifery is a critical yet amazingly rewarding career, requiring real dedication, determination, and a desire to accomplish.
Women who have their babies in hospitals today spend less time on the ward and are frequently released soon after giving birth. Birthing units are getting more popular and provide parents and birthing partners the chance to be independent but with specialist support. Hence, midwives have less time to build a bond with parents, therefore, have to be excellent communicators – notably considering the huge array of people they’re in contact with. They have to show a passion for looking after individuals and respond professionally in most situations.
As knowledge about childbirth and pregnancy has grown, the use of midwives has enlarged, often now starting to work with moms from the moment they are trying to conceive, during their pregnancy, and often well into the postnatal period. Their skills have been required to develop alongside this, and they’re now expected to understand different areas like premature births and congenital abnormalities.
Trainees will most likely recall their months in the maternity department for a student nurse with great affection, but as a young person, we do not believe one appreciates what the moms are going through. It was a frightening and loud experience, as girls are completely reliant on you having the knowledge and skills to reassure them in a very vulnerable time in their lives.
You learn very quickly that moms only need to know that everything will be nice and that the midwives can stick to the birthing program or provide them the medication they need. It was more than a rewarding element to nurses’ training, and you will always remember the infants they saw being born during their months of training.
The Future of Midwifery
Like other regions, you will find ever-changing and ever-growing demands on midwives. By way of instance, the profile of those moms that they treat is changing – it might be looking after a woman who’s a refugee and speaks no English or an older mother having her first child.
The average age of a first-time mum is 30.5 years, and the average proportion of first-time mothers aged above 30 has risen by 7 percent since 2007, now sitting at 55 percent. This trend suggests that a growing number of ladies are waiting to have kids later in life, which introduces different concerns and concerns for midwives to consider when they’re caring for their patients.
The amount of live births each year is also decreasing, but this doesn’t imply that midwives will soon be out of a job. As a result of the advancement of technologies, women might decide to give birth someplace other than the hospital – and complicated pregnancies do not automatically mean that a baby won’t survive. Midwives could possibly be attending home births and deliveries in new birthing units in addition to hospital births.
Fathers are also starting to have a bigger role to play and want greater involvement in the birthing procedure- a midwife’s role may extend to the dads, too, particularly if they’re the mother’s selected birthing companion. Midwives aren’t only delivering babies but are highly skilled members of the health care team. In the future, it might be that midwives will need to be more flexible and have more understanding about community care and working in a diverse environment.
Strengthening Quality Midwifery Training For Universal Health Coverage 2030
Working together to ensure quality care for all newborns and mothers. When midwives are educated to global standards, and midwifery involves family planning, it might avert more than 80 percent of maternal deaths, neonatal deaths, and stillbirths. Achieving this effect also requires that midwives are certified, controlled, fully integrated into health systems, and functioning in interprofessional teams.
Beyond preventing newborn and maternal deaths, quality midwifery care improves over 50 other medical effects, including reproductive and sexual health, immunization, tobacco cessation in pregnancy, breastfeeding, malaria, early childhood development, HIV, TB, and postpartum depression obesity in pregnancy.
Midwives are uniquely able to give women and newborns essential services in even the most difficult humanitarian, delicate and conflict-affected environment. This means that midwives will make a valuable contribution to providing on the commitments made in the Astana Declaration on Primary Health Care and the Global Action Plan on Healthy Lives and Well-Being.
Training midwives to global standards is a cost-effective investment since it conserves resources by reducing unnecessary and costly interventions.
Yet, there’s a startling lack of investment in quality midwifery education, regardless of the effect’s evidence. Now’s the time to take collective actions.
Happy International Day of the Midwife
The idea of having a day to honor and recognize midwives came out of the 1987 International Confederation of Midwives conference in the Netherlands. International Midwives’ Day was celebrated May 5, 1991, and has been observed in more than 50 countries worldwide.
Every year, the ICM selects a theme to inspire its member institutions, partners, and stakeholders to increase awareness about midwives’ status and the critical care to moms, their babies, and families.
When the ICM decided this year’s theme, they could not have thought that by May 5, we’d be amid the worldwide pandemic COVID-19. It is more important than ever to acknowledge the critical support midwives provide families in even the toughest of circumstances and celebrate important events like IDM during these challenging times.
Please share the information with other midwives in your province or state. The more positive boost midwifery gets, the more birth options women will have!
Have fun celebrating this fantastic day! And please let us know what has been achieved in your area in the manner of proclamations and events to further support midwifery care for pregnant women.
Ways To Increase Awareness
- Get a proclamation acknowledging this day from the local officials or governor. Make preparations to pick up local assertions yourself or send a representative of your company or a group of midwifery supporters. Try to get media coverage.
- Plan a potluck dinner, a picnic in the park, or a rally for the families you’ve served. Think about opening it to the public and media (“come talk with a few homebirth families” or”come see why these families used a midwife”).
- Have an Open House in your workplace. Invite the mayor, governor, or your legislator to your occasion. Invite local physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, and health officials. Have a demonstration ready describing the benefits of midwifery care.
- Participate in a TV or radio talk-show or interview.
- Organize a church ceremony or plant a tree at a local park to commemorate the day.
- Office supply stores now have stationery items like greeting cards and postcards, which feed through your printer.
- Create and distribute flyers about International Midwives’ Day and midwifery. Send out to the general public, legislators, policymakers, insurance companies, etc. Send legislators a “new constituent birth announcement.”
- Have a gathering of midwives. Send all of the midwives a copy of your proclamation in your community if you can copy it on special paper. Frame it and take the regional midwife out to lunch and present her statement as an award. Call some customers to join you and invite the media to an (inexpensive, easy to arrange ) Award Ceremony in honor of the day.
- Wear lapel ribbons representing the day (in Michigan, they wear pink and blue ribbons). Let folks at other meetings you attend understand that International Midwives Day is coming up. Take some ribbons together, distribute them, and ask people to wear them on May 5.
- Send out Public Service Announcements to TV and local radio.
- Prepare to have a display or a booth in a health or shopping mall, women’s, or children’s fairs.
- Give excellent gifts to infants born on International Midwives’ Day. Send their pictures to the newspaper with birth news.
Above all, get as much press coverage of events as you can. Send out press releases before and after International Midwives’ Day. Take photos at your event and send copies to the newspaper after your event. Make your celebration of the event as people as possible. Celebrate the outstanding work of midwifery with your community and reach out to individuals that aren’t yet aware of these wonders to be able to educate them!