Midwifery & Women's Health

What should the concept of complete maternity care embrace? What contribution can it make to the individual and society? What is the role of the various professions providing service? And what part should expectant parents be encouraged and helped to play? This book explores the full range of the art and science of obstetric nursing. Interwoven with detailed scientific facts and practical guides to techniques are a broad and tender philosophy and an understanding, based on actual experience, of how good maternity nursing can enrich the childbearing experience and foster the necessary adjustments within the family. -- from Foreword.

The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

Since childbirth became a medicalized - and usually hospitalized - event a century ago, women's and families' psychosocial needs have been relegated to a somewhat peripheral role within the clinically focussed hierarchy of medical care. This text reinstates psychosocial issues as a primary focus of care, together with clinical excellence. Family-centred care is a familiar phrase in today's maternity services, with professional guidelines and hospital policies including the term in their care protocols; however, few definitions, and no specific standards, for family-centred care exist. While all caregivers and care services are likely to define their care as sensitive to women's needs, and family-centred, the actual implementation of a family-centred approach - despite it being a current fashion in care - is still inadequate. This book clearly defines family-centred perinatal care, and outlines how truly family-centred care can, and should, be implemented, and how, and where, this has been done.