Midwifery & Women's Health

Many regulatory and professional agencies countenance the idea of patient-and family-centered care, yet lack an infrastructure able to support such care or employ health care professionals who lack the necessary education, experience, or skills. This book is a comprehensive guide to family-centered care for healthy, ill, or preterm newborns. It guides health care professionals in creating, supporting, and advancing a culture that values partnerships with families. The book is replete with practical suggestions, strategies for effectively communicating with families, and best practices for health professionals who wish to develop partnerships with families before and after childbirth. At the core of family-centered care is the belief that family-centered care and the ability to convey its particular language is as important to newborn and family wellbeing as clinical care. The book is based on four guiding principles that include treating people with dignity and respect, providing information in ways that are useful and affirming, welcoming family participation in care and decision-making at a level chosen by the family, and collaborating with families at the bedside and beyond. The book offers strategies to promote implementation of a family-centered environment in the delivery room or NICU, practical approaches to communicating with families before and after delivery, and tips on policy review to facilitate a culture of family-centered care. It also discusses how to welcome families during interdisciplinary rounds and nurse hand-offs, and ways to support families during procedures and resuscitation. Key Features: Provides a comprehensive guide to implementing family-centered care for healthy, ill, and preterm newborns Guides health care professionals in creating, supporting, and advancing a culture that values partnerships with families Offers strategies for effectively communicating with families to foster family-centered care Reflects on the power of language used with and about families Includes tips on policy review to foster and support a culture of family-centered care

The classic guide to an unmedicated childbirth, fully revised for the twenty-first century—with updated information and attractive new illustrations and photos throughout. For women birthing vaginally, 90% of Bradley births are drug-free! The Bradley Method®, used and praised by women for almost seventy years, prepares you for drug and surgery-free childbirth and puts you in control by providing the tools to navigate evidence-based care. Certified childbirth educator Susan McCutcheon, one of Dr. Bradley’s first students, now makes this natural approach to childbirth more accessible than ever. You will learn: • Exercises and nutrition to get your body ready for birthing • To defuse fear by understanding all aspects of laboring • How to involve your partner as a birth coach and a fully engaged participant • What’s driving the induction epidemic and how to avoid an unnecessary induction • What’s driving the cesarean surgery epidemic and how to reduce your risk • How to get the information you need to make informed decisions about your birth “The Bradley Method’s simple objective, through relaxation, breathing, and visualization, is a birth free of the interventions frequently offered to women in the different stages of childbirth: fetal monitors, drug-induced labor, anesthesia, episiotomy, and Caesarean section. (Its) other defining feature, the husband’s active participation in the delivery, is critical to this overall goal of an intervention-free birth.”—Mothering

The Lamaze method is virtually synonymous with natural childbirth in America. In the 1970s, taking Lamaze classes was a common rite of passage to parenthood. The conscious relaxation and patterned breathing techniques touted as a natural and empowering path to the alleviation of pain in childbirth resonated with the feminist and countercultural values of the era. In Lamaze, historian Paula A. Michaels tells the surprising story of the Lamaze method from its origins in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, to its popularization in France in the 1950s, and then to its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s in the US. Michaels shows how, for different reasons, in disparate national contexts, this technique for managing the pain of childbirth without resort to drugs found a following. The Soviet government embraced this method as a panacea to childbirth pain in the face of the material shortages that followed World War II. Heated and sometimes ideologically inflected debates surrounded the Lamaze method as it moved from East to West amid the Cold War. Physicians in France sympathetic to the communist cause helped to export it across the Iron Curtain, but politics alone fails to explain why French women embraced this approach. Arriving on American shores around 1960, the Lamaze method took on new meanings. Initially it offered a path to a safer and more satisfying birth experience, but overtly political considerations came to the fore once again as feminists appropriated it as a way to resist the patriarchal authority of male obstetricians. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Michaels pieces together this complex and fascinating story at the crossroads of the history of politics, medicine, and women. The story of Lamaze illuminates the many contentious issues that swirl around birthing practices in America and Europe. Brimming with insight, Michaels' engaging history offers an instructive intervention in the debate about how to achieve humane, empowering, and safe maternity care for all women.