A great deal of misinformation exists about women's use of substances during pregnancy and lactation. A health care provider's challenge is to know the true risks and bene ts, both to the mother and to her fetus or baby, of taking versus stopping the use of a medication or other substance. Yet the average provider is not well equipped to give the best advice to women who are pregnant or breastfeeding and exposed to psychotropics. - "Is it ever safe to drink alcohol when breastfeeding?" - "What are the risks to the baby if the mother uses cannabis while pregnant or breastfeeding?" - "Are the effects of smoking different during pregnancy versus during breastfeeding?" - "Can a woman safely breastfeed her baby when taking codeine?" Exposure to Psychotropic Medications and Other Substances during Pregnancy and Lactation: A Handbook for Health Care Providers is a convenient source of evidence-based information and recommendations on these and many other questions for primary care physicians, psychiatrists, pharmacists, obstetricians, midwives, public health nurses and nurse practitioners. The handbook: - details the properties and effects of many psychotropic medications and other substances, and provides recommendations for how to advise women using these substances - dispels common myths about drug exposure during pregnancy and lactation - discusses key principles for clinical approaches to working with pregnant or breastfeeding women who use psychotropic medications or other substances - covers screening best practices and provides screening tools - explores the critical therapeutic role that all health professionals can play in helping women move toward better health outcomes for themselves and their babies. The production of this handbook has been made possible through a nancial contribution from Health Canada.

"At Work in the Field of Birth" is an ethnographic study of midwifery in Canada in the wake of its historic transition from the margins as a grassroots social movement devoted to low-tech, woman-centered care to a regulated profession within the public health care system. In January 1994, after decades of lobbying by midwives and their supporters, the province of Ontario recognized midwifery as a profession for the first time in more than a century.

Through stories about becoming and being a midwife and stories about receiving midwifery care, this book describes how fundamental tenets of midwifery philosophy and practice--the meaning of tradition, natural birth, and home birth, and the place of medical technology in midwifery--are being reworked by the practical and ideological challenges of midwifery's new place within the formal health care system. MacDonald presents contemporary midwifery as a complex cultural system in which "nature" and "tradition" emerge as dynamic rather than esssentialized social categories of meaning and experience.

STORY EXCERPT:
Martina, another rural midwife, tells me "My great-grandmother was a midwife . . . so I sort of have this idea that there is still a bit of that in my blood. But at the same time-I mean, we don't just get called during labour-it's much more clinical. We are doing blood work that my grandmother wouldn't have done and more lab work and tests. But I want to hold on to some of that. I don't want to become a techno midwife. It's not what I want to do at all. It doesn't mean tat we don't use technology or are not willing to-we certainly do, all the time. But I think that one thing that attracts women to midwives and certainlyattracts women to become midwives is the sense of the neighbour, the friend, having a cup of tea. It is more friendly, you've got time to spend with women."

The result of a ten-year collaboration between Australian and Samoan researchers and midwives, this book compiles the first-person stories of several generations of Samoan midwives, both those who use traditional techniques for home birth and those who use Western techniques in a hospital. The voices are vivid and varied, often displaying the Samoan gift for storytelling.

The overall picture of changing birthing practices is complex and sometimes tinged with ironies. As the introduction says, "These Samoan nurses and midwives did not immediately attempt to mediate new and old ways of birthing after the colonial leadership of their profession left. They themselves became cultural agents for change as they continued the role of 'colonizing' their own birth tradition and taught the fa'atosaga Samoan for midwife] Western techniques, at the same time trying to provide a professional midwife for all women. Paradoxically they often chose a social midwife for their own births and supported or at least condoned the social midwives close to them. . . . Kaisarina, while working as the leading professional midwife in the country, and working almost totally in hospital practice herself, simultaneously assisted her mother-in-law with her social practice of midwifery. Vipulo's story shows how a professional midwife preferred to have her mother, a social midwife, deliver her at home."

A particular objective of the authors is to encourage a reconception of maternity care in countries where professional services are rare and not available to all women. The book challenges common assumptions, still held in many postcolonial countries, that a simple migration of Western-style, hospital-focused care is necessarily always an achievable or desirable goal. It also demonstrates the considerable progress that one group has made in rethinking and developing a model of maternity care that works within their society and culture. As these midwives' stories suggest, solutions to some of the problems caused by gaps in the kinds of resources that Westerners take for granted can be found in partnerships and cultural wisdom that already exist in Samoa and, by extension, other developing countries.

A Pocket Guide to Clinical Midwifery: The Efficient Midwife, Second Edition is a must-have resource for midwives, women's health nurse practitioners, and all levels of health care providers working in the women's health field. Organized alphabetically for easy reference, it features important concepts, diagnostic tools, algorithms, and management options, including conventional, lifestyle, and complementary therapies, all in one place. Completely updated and revised, the new edition offers current evidence-based references, the latest medication recommendations, and midwifery practice pearls. Also provided are recent changes to practice, such as FHR monitoring, hypertensive guidelines, contraception updates, prenatal care, LGBTQIA+ support, precepting, sexual health, and evidence-based practice.

The present edition is an English translation of the book published in Russian by the Medical Literature State Publishing House in 1954. The book contains the lectures delivered by its authors at the courses for obstetricians and gynaecologists conducted at the Kharkov Institute of Advanced Medical Training.

Health care professionals need to make rapid decisions under pressure to prevent and manage adverse outcomes during childbirth. Using an enquiry-based learning approach, this book offers a straightforward but comprehensive guide to emergency care, with scenarios throughout and expert commentary from a Supervisor of Midwives. It all addresses all major emergency situations as well as legal and clinical governance issues. It is essential reading for all midwives, paramedics and allied health professionals involved in the provision of obstetric care away from the acute setting.

So, you think you want to be a lactation consultant, open a private practice, and earn a good living by helping mother and babies breastfeed? This is the book for you The Lactation Consultant in Private Practice: The ABCs of Getting Started is a user-friendly orientation and guide to the lactation consultant profession for those interested in running a full-time, profitable, and long-term lactation consultant practice. Author Linda J. Smith presents her original "ABC" sequential format of essential skills necessary to start a successful practice in three balanced sections: Attitude, Business Skills, and Clinical Skills. Each section begins with an overview, contains a "pitfalls and problems" chapter and two examples of successful private practices from around the world.

To ensure the unfolding and development of a student nurse on a personal as well as a student nurse on a personal as well as a professional level, necessitates the acquisition of firstly, a solid theoretical foundation and, secondly, the mastering of certain psychomotor skills. The new manual of midwifery procedures provides the necessary information regarding important psychomotor skills. The procedures were set out according to principles and not specifies. Through the application of the basic principles assimilated in this manual, within the scope of a practice and the existing ethical codes, each nurse will ensure the promotion of safe nursing care for the patients.

Case Studies in Breastfeeding: Problem Solving Skills and Strategies combines logic, wisdom, and theory in order to convey a deeper understanding of how to act in accordance with the highest needs of the breastfeeding mother and baby. In this book, authors Karin Cadwell, PhD, RN, IBCLC and Cindy Turner-Maffei, MA, IBCLC develop a consultative framework and present illustrative case studies designed to increase the practitioner's knowledge about managing complex breastfeeding cases. It includes tables and charts as well as color prints.

Revised and updated, this new 6th edition is the all-in-one source for practical, reliable information on nursing care during the childbearing years. Designed to meet the needs of today's students, it addresses the fundamentals of maternity nursing with a clear, more readable writing style and a concise, more focused content presentation. Integrating the importance of understanding family, culture, and health promotion into the continuum of care, it also includes a strategic integration of community-based care to emphasize that care can take place wherever the woman may be.

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Supportive Care and Midwifery" explores the increasingly powerful movement to utilize support during childbearing. Support is examined at various levels including personal interaction, clinical practice and management, and policy making. The book critically analyses the current situation from an international perspective and considers support by and for those involved in maternity care.

The book reflects Rosemary Mander's active research orientation as well as academic background. The research base is crucial throughout, and is most evident in the author's account of her own study. The origins, uses and misuses of research evidence emerge as fundamental; the political implications of these phenomena also become apparent as the argument develops. The author concludes by looking to the future and anticipating the development of support for the childbearing woman.

This text can be used to address discrete and specific support-related issues, as well as being read in its entirety to follow the unfolding of a powerful and persuasive argument.

Key features:
Emphasises evidence-based practice
Critically analyses the phenomena
Focuses on the woman's experience
Accessible and reader-friendly"

Supportive Care and Midwifery" is essential reading for midwives in training and for post-registration students on undergraduate programmes. It is also a valuable text for post-graduate students, practicing midwives, service providers and health visitors.

Despite our country's affluence and high-tech advances in neonatal intensive care, in 1994 the U.S. ranked twenty-first in infant mortality rates among developed countries with populations over 2.5 million. Women with low-risk pregnancies are frequently failed by the traditional obstetrical system, either because they cannot afford proper prenatal care—and therefore often give birth to babies who need to be assisted by expensive neonatal intensive care—or because the system fosters an attitude of dependency on doctors, surgery and drugs, rather than a sense of empowerment during the birth process. This enlightening book demonstrates with conviction that childbirth can and should be a process of empowerment, and that midwifery should be the standard of care for women with low-risk pregnancies. Diary of a Midwife, written by a certified nurse-midwife and the founder of the first nurse-midwifery graduate education program in Virginia, is based on the author's 13 years delivering babies in rural Virginia. Through the author's experiences as a midwife, mother of three, and veteran of training as a labor and delivery nurse in a busy hospital's maternity ward, the midwife care alternative is revealed to be the best way for healthy women to be collaborators in their own care. Midwives encourage women to develop their inner power for the birth process by providing teaching, support, and comfort. Adequate prenatal care reduces the number of premature and low-birth weight babies, and costly, traumatic medical interventions such as Cesarean and forceps deliveries, episiotomies and routine anesthesia are often avoided. Author Juliana van Olphen-Fehr movingly shows that midwifery is an art and that it can do much to create mothers who are able to greet their newborns with dignified, loving, and strong arms. _

Making Midwives Legal explores what happens when midwifery and medicine are brought together by legal regulation. Combining historical data on the regulation of midwifery in Europe and the United States with a field study of the regulation of midwifery in Texas, Arizona, and California, Raymond G. DeVries uncovers the subtle ways legislation alters the profession - demonstrating both beneficial and detrimental consequences. This new edition includes an updated preface that situates the themes of the book in the current debate over health care and midwifery, an epilogue that examines the major issues in the 1990s and comments on developments that have taken place over the past decade, and an updated bibliography. By encouraging thoughtful policy changes in maternity care, Making Midwives Legal contributes to our understanding of the workings of health care systems, medical professions, and the relation between the law and medicine.

This extraordinary book reveals the experiences of twenty different wo men diagnosed with breast cancer. With extreme courage, insight, and c ompassion, the women uncover intimate perspectives of illness and reco very. In their own words, the women share how they have dealt with tre atment, coped with emotional and physical stress, faced the threat of recurring cancer, strengthened ties with family and friends, confronte d mortality, and developed new outlooks and philosophies. Breast Cance r is a remarkable book ideal for health professionals, educators, stud ents, patients, and their families, anyone interested in developing ne w insights into disease and living.

This book traces the illness of the late Elizabeth Gee (former Interim Executive Director of the Center for Human Caring) from the original diagnosis of breast cancer to her battle with terminal illness. Absorb ing and beautifully written, the book captures the anguish of confront ing a mortal illness and the courage of one woman who made this confro ntation an affirmation of life.

Jane Dwinell has written an important book using real-life scenarios to illustrate her unique philosophy of childbirth, one that can only inspire women to take greater control over how and where they give birth. From her vantage point as a birth attendant, Dwinell recounts the moving birth experiences of twenty different women. Thus the reader learns that there are no "right" or "wrong" ways to give birth. In fact, the author shows how satisfying it can be for women to exercise their own power of choice in the birth process instead of yielding to unnecessary technological and medical interventions. Birth, she says, is a process of wellness, not illness. Hence, most women don't need medication to help them deal with normal birth pains if they yeild to the strength within their own bodies, and if they have the proper support during labor. When women give birth in a comfortable setting of their choice, the medical wrongs against them, committed in hospitals in the name of "safety" and technology, are prevented. In the face of opposition from an entrenched segment of the medical establishment, Dwinell dares the view that hospital care should not be routine but should be given only with good reason and the women's permission. For pregnant women and their partners, Birth Stories makes a convincing argument that under normal circumstances each women's intuitive knowledge and individual resources can help her to labor and give birth successfully in her own way. Nurses, midwives, doctors, and birth educators will find it useful to realize that there are many ways to give birth . . . that it is important for the family to be together and make their own choices . . . and that pregnant women canhave safe births without excessive medical intervention. Finally, Birth Stories also serves as a unique guide for those professionals who are seeking a woman-centered birth model for their institutions.

Global and national confidential inquiry reports show that 60 to 80% of maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality are due to avoidable errors. This comprehensive and illustrated second edition offers a practical guide to the management of obstetric, medical, surgical, anaesthetic and newborn emergencies in addition to organisational and training issues. The book is divided conveniently into nine sections and updated throughout in line with modern research and practice. Several new chapters cover setting up skills and drills training in maternity services to reduce avoidable harm, managing obstetric emergencies during 'home births' and in low-risk midwifery units, and minimizing maternal and fetal morbidity in failed operative vaginal delivery. Each chapter includes a practical algorithm for quick reference, the scientific basis for proposed actions, a case-based practical exercise and useful learning tools such as 'Key Pearls' and 'Key Pitfalls'. An invaluable resource for obstetricians, neonatologists, midwives, medical students, anesthesiologists and the wider perinatal team.

'I promised that I would one day write a book and tell the world about the home for unmarried mothers. I have at last kept my promise.' In Ireland, 1951, the young June Goulding took up a position as midwife in a home for unmarried mothers run by the Sacred Heart nuns. What she witnessed there was to haunt her for the next fifty years. It was a place of secrets, lies and cruelty. A place where women picked grass by hand and tarred roads whilst heavily pregnant. Where they were denied any contact with the outside world; denied basic medical treatment and abused for their 'sins'; where, after the birth, they were forced into hard labour in the convent for three years. But worst of all was that the young women were expected to raise their babies during these three years so that they could then be sold - given up for adoption in exchange for a donation to the nuns. Shocked by the nuns' inhumane treatment of the frightened young women, June risked her job to bring some light into their dark lives. June's memoir tells the story of twelve women's experiences in this home and of the hardships they endured, but also the kindness she offered them, and the hope she was able to bring.

Gaining a first job as a nurse or midwife is becoming not only highly competitive but an increasingly more complex process. This practical guide will help students get ahead of other applicants by picking apart the experience of applying for a job from start to finish. Readers will discover a wealth of information on career planning, continuing professional development and next steps. Accessible and user-friendly, this is an essential text for student nurses and midwives at any stage in their pre-registration education, and more especially for those in their final year, as they prepare for the move into qualified employment or further discipline specific study.

Maternal Newborn Nursing Care Plans, Third Edition teaches students and practicing nurses how to assess, plan, provide, and evaluate care for pregnancy, delivery, recovery, abnormal conditions, and newborn care. Featuring more than 65 of the most common and high-risk care plans for nursing care using the nursing process approach, it includes NIC interventions, discussions on collaborative problems, key nursing activities, signs and symptoms, and diagnostic studies. Using a progressive approach, the text begins with generic care plans that address all patient situations regardless of the patient diagnosis or condition before moving on to more complicated and specific care plans. The Third Edition offers new rationales for nursing actions based on scientific principles, a new breastfeeding care plan added to the normal newborn care chapter, new information on obesity in pregnancy, evidence-based practice boxes throughout to highlight current research, and updated references and research. Also included are new guidelines, practice changes, new standards, and evidence changes. * Consistent organization based on commonly encountered nursing diagnoses * Comprehensive coverage of normal pregnancy and common complications of pregnancy * Individualized and collaborative care plans cover both actual and potential problems and conditions * Content in concert with the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) mandate to improve the quality and safety of patient outcomes

The object of the author in writing this volume is to offer to nurses, and especially to those women who desire to make monthly nursing a vocation, the instruction which they need for that purpose. The book is written under a firm conviction in the mind of the author that a work of this character is needed at the present timea work that combines some information to the monthly nurse in regard to her peculiar duties with considerable instruction in midwifery. He has learned during the forty-five years that he has practiced medicine in a small city and its vicinity, that mother and nurse are often combined in the same person. The important duty of nursing the sick is so generally performed by mothers, that they also, as a class, require some scientific knowledge to be acquired by means of plain, practical instruction. And, in fact, throughout our country, every mother is liable, in an emergency, to be called upon to fill the office of an accoucheur.

The second edition of the popular Midwifery Essentials series continues to help readers understand and master a range of core issues safely and with confidence! Written by leading midwifery academics, each book in the series provides a user-friendly source of information which has been fully updated throughout to reflect the latest evidence-base for current practice. Now with an improved design to make learning as easy as possible, each paperback in the series focuses on the importance of communication and contemporary women-centred care and presents helpful 'scenarios' to encourage debate and reflection. The Midwifery Essentials series is ideal for all midwives - whether qualified or in training - and is also helpful to nurses and HCAs working in the maternity environment. Fully updated to provide a useful, friendly source of information Strong focus on contemporary women-centred care Designed to stimulate debate and reflection upon current practice, local policies and procedures Scenarios enable practitioners to understand the context of maternity care and explore their role in safe and effective service provision Helpful 'jigsaw' approach enables readers to explore specific topics from a variety of perspectives e.g. consent, safety and health promotion Explains the professional and legal issues surrounding clinical procedures Chapters designed to be read as a 'standalone' or in succession Emphasises the crucial role of effective communication Makes reference to the latest national and international guidelines Contains new scenarios to reflect recent changes in practice Improved layout aids retention and learning Fully updated throughout with the latest evidence base for clinical skills and procedures Embraces the principles of 'Better Births'

The new edition of this ground-breaking text is an essential resource for the management of drugs during pregnancy, labour and the postnatal period. Fully updated in line with current midwifery practice, it includes new chapters on Disorders of the Immune System and Recreational Drugs, and expanded coverage of pain relief.