What has public health got to do with midwifery? Midwives’ role in securing better health outcomes for mothers and babies
Introduction
Public health is crucial to all of us. Despite the fact that the provision of acute health services seems to bear little relationship to the health of the population, the maternity services hold a unique position in influencing current and future maternal and infant health and midwives play a pivotal role.
Midwives provide care at the most critical times during the childbearing cycle, and as they become increasingly involved in all aspects of maternity care provision, their role in securing the overall health of mothers and babies needs to be made more explicit. It is timely to acknowledge the important contribution midwives make to maternal and infant health and to highlight that midwifery practice can and does have a profound impact on the health of the population.
Section snippets
What is public health and what has it got to do with midwifery?
Public health is defined as
“...the organised response by society to protect and promote health, and to prevent illness, injury and disability. The starting point for identifying public health issues, problems and priorities, and for designing and implementing interventions, is the population as a whole, or population sub-groups.” [1, p. 2]
Public health may seem remote from the day to day concerns of a busy maternity hospital and the midwives working within it. However, with the Commonwealth
Conclusion
It can be a challenge for midwives to go beyond thinking about the individual women and babies they see on a daily basis. As important as it is to think about the care of individuals on a day to day practice level, it can be self-limiting. Midwives need to view their care and the outcomes of it in the context of the broader population of childbearing women. Focussing just on individuals will not allow midwives to see the results of practices that may well be detrimental.
If midwives can re-frame
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