midwife's muse

Safe Practice

From reading my comments I have deduced that some readers may not hail from Great Britain so their experiences of care during pregnancy etc may differ from us Island folk. I'll just give those amongst you who are innocent of our system a quick run through. In G.B we have midwives everywhere. According to statistics midwives are the lead professionals in the majority of pregnancies, births and aftercare. Most midwives are employed directly by the local hospital, or Trust, as they are fondly known now. We do have some independant midwives ( I would love to be one but the insurance is too high ) on the whole though midwives refers to NHS employed people. When a woman finds out she is with child she choses where she wants to have her baby and the system swings into action. She is booked for that place, sees a hospital doctor if there are any probs, but the majority of care is by a midwife. Maternity units are mainly staffed by midwives but there are always doctors available if there are problems. We also have a few birth centres which only have midwives and are only for low-risk Mums. Hospital employed midwives also do homebirths, these are usually community midwives, of which I am one. We do all the antenatal care, homebirths and aftercare. Oh yes that's something different again. In the UK we care for women for up to 28 days after the birth. We visit at home and check that all is OK with Mum and baby and, if by day 10 everything is going normally, we discharge them from our care and someone called a Health Visitor takes over. Missed out loads, but basically that's a midwife. Apparently we are an endangered species as we are fleeing the profession in our droves, I shall comment on that another time. Be warned!

Anyway, safe practice. Midwives have to have a supervisory interview once a year. I've just had mine. All my women will be pleased to hear that I am safe to practice. Questions have been answered, updates completed and record keeping reviewed. The system considers me OK, the question is - do I consider the system is functioning well?(See the above.)

My pregnant daughter is in Italy at the moment. She is 29 weeks and has gone snowboarding with partner. They are due back tomorrow and from then on she is staying in England. Whilst she's been away I have bought two pushchairs and two baby chairs from that wonderful institution E-Bay, I'm really enjoying being an expectant grandmother! I think I will enjoy being a Grandmother, its just the birth I'm not looking forward to, so I think daughter and I probably have loads in common there.

24.2.04 14:37