Health visitors play a crucial role in supporting mothers who choose to breastfeed and their families. This accessible text enables readers to practise confidently in this vital area, focusing on underpinning knowledge and parent-centred counselling skills, and understanding cultural contexts. Breastfeeding a child improves the lifelong health of a population, and promoting breastfeeding is an important area of public health practice. Breastfeeding for Public Health incorporates the voices of health visitors, mothers and fathers to give insight into common practical challenges faced and suggestions for overcoming or working around them. Presenting up-to-date research, it explores the practical skills needed by health visitors to support mothers with breastfeeding; how to develop the communication skills and self-awareness necessary to build successful and trusting relationships with women and their families; why breastfeeding is so important for babies' and mothers' health and psychological attachment, closeness and long-term mental health; what we know about the content of breastmilk and the positive effect it has on the baby's gut microbiome, which in turn benefits the infant's long-term health and helps to protect against non-communicable diseases; the role of the father and grandparents in successfully initiating and sustaining breastfeeding; and how cultural awareness and sensitivity can influence practice for the better. Written by an experienced volunteer and practitioner with decades of experience as a health visitor and breastfeeding counsellor, this text is ideal for students taking Specialist Community and Public Health Nursing courses. It is also an important reference for practising health visitors.

Good intentions to do our best in healthcare are not enough. Healthcare professionals need to know how to close the gap between best evidence and practice, by understanding and applying quality improvement principles and processes. Improving Healthcare is a practical guide, providing healthcare staff with the knowledge and skills that enable them to implement, evaluate and disseminate a quality improvement project in their own workplace. With a comprehensive coverage, chapters cover the history, selection and application of quality improvement philosophies and methods in clinical healthcare at team, unit, organisational and system levels. The book also considers social processes of implementation as well as technical aspects of measuring and improving quality. As an essential guide for healthcare practitioners at any level who are new to service improvement, Improving Healthcare includes practical examples and case studies of healthcare improvements that illustrate the concepts discussed.

The study of sociology is now an essential part of all midwifery training, but it can often seem removed from the reality of midwifery practice. Midwives often ask: what is sociology? Why do I need sociology to be a midwife? How can sociology help improve my clinical practice? This major new textbook answers these important questions and shows how sociology can inform the practice of midwifery in the twenty-first century. It provides a comprehensive, jargon-free introduction to sociology for midwifery students with no prior knowledge of the subject, as well as practising midwives with experience of dealing with sociological issues in their daily work. Although the book assumes little or no previous knowledge of sociology it provides enough depth to meet the needs of those with some background in the field. At every stage the links between sociology and everyday practice are emphasised and explained, using a wealth of case studies and examples. The book provides: * Clearly defined learning aims and objectives * Structured activities and questions for discussion * A glossary of key sociological concepts * Annotated suggestions for further reading The editors and contributors have considerable experience teaching sociology at diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate levels to students from many different disciplines. This book will be an indispensable teaching aid within midwifery education, and other relevant health and social care disciplines.

Comprehensive survey of the health communication discipline authored by top scholars in the field. A useful text for use both in graduate seminars in health communication and as a desk reference for career researchers and government and NGO health professionals.

Living with Uncertainty gives a broad perspective on the complexities and challenges of the practice of end-of-life care, as well as the perceived benefits and limitations of medical intervention. Drawn from research and clinical and pastoral experience, the book examines the feelings associated with the end of life, highlighting the demands that people are faced with and their consequences. It moves into the difficult area of people who feel defeated by their illness and can or want to live no longer, as well as the family, caregivers and professionals who surround them. These perspectives have been built upon around a hundred narratives of lived experience, combined with the wider clinical and practical range of voices. A topical post-script Lessons from Covid-19 captures the choices and challenges on a personal, professional and systemic level which the pandemic acutely revealed with a multiplicity of examples. This will be essential reading for students and professionals in palliative and end-of-life care. Families and friends will also benefit from this book as they try to come to terms with the delicate but universal issues of death and dying.

Squaring the Circle is a cutting-edge and comprehensive collection of the latest research and debate on normal childbirth. Based on a salutogenic approach - focusing on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease - it helps our understanding of what works and why it works, as well as helping health practitioners turn this knowledge into best practice. Written by world-renowned experts in their field, and edited by Soo Downe and Sheena Byrom, the editors of the acclaimed The Roar Behind the Silence, Squaring the Circle includes an examination of a range of associated evidence in areas as diverse as architecture for optimal birth environments, the impact of birth events on neonatal DNA methylation and the microbiome, the current knowledge base around oxytocin production in labour, and the role of emotion in the workplace. Case studies of successful change from around the world - from service users, activists and maternity care staff - provide inspiration for innovation while hints and tips help to make such change happen.

Using Guided Imagery and Hypnosis in Brief Therapy and Palliative Care presents a model for effective single-session therapy. Chapters include more than a dozen case studies with transcripts and commentary. Readers will learn how to use an adapted model of Remen's healing circle for preparing patients for surgery, and guided imagery and other approaches are presented for enhancing palliative care. Extensive appendixes provide a wide variety of valuable tools that psychotherapists can use with clients concerned with end-of-life issues.

This book reconstructs the role of midwives in medieval to early modern Islamic history through a careful reading of a wide range of classical and medieval Arabic sources. The author casts the midwife's social status in premodern Islam as a privileged position from which she could mediate between male authority in patriarchal society and female reproductive power within the family. This study also takes a broader historical view of midwifery in the Middle East by examining the tensions between learned medicine (male) and popular, medico-religious practices (female) from early Islam into the Ottoman period and addressing the confrontation between traditional midwifery and Western obstetrics in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The study of sociology is now an essential part of all midwifery training, but it can often seem removed from the reality of midwifery practice. Midwives often ask: what is sociology? Why do I need sociology to be a midwife? How can sociology help improve my clinical practice? This major new textbook answers these important questions and shows how sociology can inform the practice of midwifery in the twenty-first century. It provides a comprehensive, jargon-free introduction to sociology for midwifery students with no prior knowledge of the subject, as well as practising midwives with experience of dealing with sociological issues in their daily work. Although the book assumes little or no previous knowledge of sociology it provides enough depth to meet the needs of those with some background in the field. At every stage the links between sociology and everyday practice are emphasised and explained, using a wealth of case studies and examples. The book provides: * Clearly defined learning aims and objectives * Structured activities and questions for discussion * A glossary of key sociological concepts * Annotated suggestions for further reading The editors and contributors have considerable experience teaching sociology at diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate levels to students from many different disciplines. This book will be an indispensable teaching aid within midwifery education, and other relevant health and social care disciplines.

A Midwife's Handbook is designed to provide nurse midwives with quick access to important clinical information. Within each chapter, topics are arranged alphabetically to further ease the access of the information. The overall objective of this handbook is to provide information for the practitioner that is detailed, generally has not been memorized, or that discusses issues which are encountered infrequently enough that a quick review of the details is helpful when the situation arises. Nurse-midwifery management guidelines are included throughout, such as when to manage independently or when to consult with the physician. This outstanding new resource will also integrate alternative and complementary therapies along with key medical information specific to midwifery practice to provide practitioners with the complete care alternatives. Provides nurse midwives quick access to important clinical information that is detailed, generally has not been memorized, or that discusses issues which are encountered infrequently enough that a quick review of the details is helpful when the situation arises. Consistent presentation in each chapter begins with a brief definition of the problem, diagnostic tests and labs, differential diagnosis where appropriate, and concludes with a decision-making tree to assist in the decision making process. Nurse-midwifery management guidelines are included throughout to provide the practitioner with important information such as when to manage independently or when to consult with the physician. UNIQUE! Integrates alternative and complementary therapies along with key medical information specific to midwifery practice to provide practitioners with complete care alternatives.

In How to Run Reflective Practice Groups: A Guide for Healthcare Professionals, Arabella Kurtz explores the use of reflective practice in the modern healthcare context. Responding to the rapidly increasing demand for reflective practice groups in healthcare and drawing on her extensive experience as a facilitator and trainer, Kurtz presents a fully developed, eight-stage model: The Intersubjective Model of Reflective Practice Groups. The book offers a guide to the organisation, structure and delivery of group sessions, with useful suggestions for overcoming commonly-encountered problems and promoting empathic relationships with clients and colleagues. Clearly and accessibly written, using full situational examples for each stage of the presented model, How to Run Reflective Practice Groups offers a comprehensive guide to facilitating reflective practice in healthcare.

Midwives increasingly have faced challenging ethical issues that have clinical and legal implications, they have not always been adequately prepared to deal with them. This book adopts a multi-disciplinary approach to guide the student and practitioner through dilemmas that commonly occur in clinical practice and to highlight the changing face of the midwifery profession.Provides a multi-disciplinary approach to guide midwives through dilemmas which occur in clinical practice Anexcellent team of contributors from the field of midwifery and ethics make this an essential purchase for every midwifery student and practitioner

This is a comprehensive overview of mental health problems associated with pregnancy and the year after delivery. This is a core component of maternity care. The second edition has been updated to reflect current practice, recent evidence and new clinical guidelines. Topics include diagnosis and management and issues for children and families.

Max van Manen offers an extensively updated edition of Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing to provide an eloquent, accessible, and detailed approach to practicing phenomenology. Phenomenology of practice refers to the meaning of doing phenomenology on experiences that are of significance to those in professional practice such as psychology, health care, education, and in contexts of ordinary living. A special feature of this update is the role of examples, anecdotes, stories, and vignettes, and the singularity of fictionalized empirical fragments in making the unknowable knowable. Accordingly, the various chapters are enriched with many intelligible examples of phenomenological essays and excursions on ordinary and extraordinary topics. These examples show that a phenomenological method can be engaged to explore virtually any lived experience or event. Max van Manen provides penetrating portrayals of depthful insights by brilliant phenomenologists. He identifies and distinguishes a variety of phenomenological orientations that are alive and current today. This book is relevant to scholars, students, and motivated readers interested in the originary meanings and methods of phenomenological human science enquiry. Max van Manen's comprehensive work is of significance to all concerned with the interrelation between being and acting, thoughtfulness and tact, in human sciences research and the phenomenology of everyday life.

A Pocket Guide for Student Midwives is an accessible, portable book offering student midwives everything they need to grasp the key elements of midwifery language, knowledge and skills.

The new edition of this useful aide-memoire is divided into two parts. The first includes relevant terms, abbreviations and definitions. The second part is a quick A-Z reference guide to common conditions, procedures, emergency situations, and supporting information, enhanced by visual material to aid comprehension of normality and anomalies. The innovative action flow charts enable rapid access to information that logically guides the reader through procedures in potentially life-threatening situations, in both home and hospital settings.

A Pocket Guide for Student Midwives is essential reading for the new non-nurse student midwife, the experienced nurse entering the midwifery profession, and senior student midwives.

Drawing on years of midwifery experience of waterbirth, this collection of stories, based on real-life events, illuminates a rewarding way of birth and emphasises the theoretical knowledge, skills, understanding, and resilience needed to practice well. Waterbirth Stories includes chapters on the criteria for use of water in labour and birth, on the different stages of labour, and on some more serious or unusual situations such as shoulder dystocia, postpartum haemorrhage, breech presentation, and other unexpected maternal and neonatal events. Each chapter includes several stories from a midwife's perspective, told in the context of evidence-based guidelines available for this topic. The stories end with learning points to help readers reflect on their own practice. Ideal for student and practising midwives with an interest in waterbirth, this research-informed book is enjoyable, challenging, and informative.

Decision-making pervades all aspects of midwifery practice across the world. Midwifery is informed by a number of decision-making theories, but it is sometimes difficult to marry these theories with practice. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of decision-making for midwives irrespective of where in the world they practice or in which model of care. The first part critically reviews decision-making theories, including the Enhancing Decision-making Assessment in Midwifery (EDAM) tool, and their relevance to midwifery. It explores the links between midwifery governance, including professional regulation and the law, risk and safety and decision-making as well as how critical thinking and reflection are essential elements of decision-making. It then goes on to present a number of diverse case studies, demonstrating how they interrelate to and impact upon optimal midwifery decision-making. Each chapter presents examples that show how the theory translates into practice and includes activities to reinforce learning points. Bringing together a diverse range of contributors, this volume will be essential reading for midwifery students, practising midwives and midwifery academics.

Focusing on reproductive and sexual justice, this important book explores in detail both the challenges that trans people face when negotiating reproductive and sexual health in restrictive social contexts, and their agency in advocating for change. Chapters cover a breadth of topics such as intimacy, sexual violence, reproductive intentions, sexuality education, oncology, and pregnancy, introducing readers to the latest research in the field as well as key emerging concepts. The authors identify core principles for trans reproductive and sexual justice, providing a broad overview of what is currently succeeding and what can be built on going into the future. Trans Reproductive and Sexual Health offers a comprehensive exploration that is essential reading for academics and students in psychology, sociology, gender studies, and related areas, as well as clinicians and policy makers, offering direct implications for professional audiences working in health and social care.

The right for every woman to have a 'natural' birth has been recognized for many years, yet surgical interventions continue to rise and, paradoxically, complaints and the degree of litigation for disappointing labor outcomes escalate. Proactive Support of Labor enhances professional skills by providing the expertise for preventing long labors - the root-cause of traumatic birth experiences and the cesarean pandemic. Step-by-step, evidence-based guidance on expert care and support during labor is given. Emphasis is placed on pre-labor education, personal attention, and well-defined birth planning - including strict diagnoses and timely corrective measures in abnormal labor - and constant audit of all procedures and outcomes. Striking a new balance between natural birth and intervention, and invariably enhancing women's satisfaction with the childbirth experience, the fully updated revision of this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for obstetricians, midwives, nurses, and trainees. For peer and reader reviews of the first edition see: www.proactivesupportoflabor.com.

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.

2021 Honorable Mention for the Association for Feminist Anthropology's Rosaldo Book Prize Maternal health outcomes are a key focus of global health initiatives. In Delivering Health, author Lydia Z. Dixon uncovers the ways such outcomes have been shaped by broader historical, political, and social factors in Mexico, through the perspectives of those who are at the front lines fighting for change: midwives. Midwives have long been marginalized in Mexico as remnants of the country's precolonial past, yet Dixon shows how they are now strategically positioning themselves as agents of modernity and development. Midwifery education programs have popped up across Mexico, each with their own critique of the health care system and vision for how midwifery can help. Delivering Health ethnographically examines three such schools with very different educational approaches and professional goals. From San Miguel de Allende to Oaxaca to MichoacAn and points between, Dixon takes us into the classrooms, clinics, and conferences where questions of what it means to provide good reproductive health care are being taught, challenged, and implemented. Through interviews, observational data, and even student artwork, we are shown how underlying inequality manifests in poor care for many Mexican women. The midwives in this book argue that they can improve care while also addressing this inequality. Ultimately, Delivering Health asks us to consider the possibility that marginalized actors like midwives may hold the solution to widespread concerns in health.

This edited collection - one of a kind in its field - addresses the theoretical and practical implications facing representations of midwifery and media. Bringing together international scholars and practitioners, this succinct volume offers a cross-disciplinary discussion regarding the role of media in childbirth, midwifery and pregnancy representation. One chapter critiques the provision and dissemination of health information and promotional materials in a suburban antenatal clinic, while others are devoted to specific forms of media - television, the press, social media - looking at how each contribute to women's perceptions and anxieties with regard to childbirth.