confessions of a pragmatic midwife stuck between the NHS and a hard place
Before becoming a midwife I had worked for a big telecoms company. They liked to consider themselves “customer focused” – after all it was the customers that they overcharged for calls to Croatia so they had to be nice to them. With this background in mind, I was a little surprised when I started working…
“So,” I start to say and curse myself for sounding too conversational. I need to be more assertive. “Is it going to deliver vaginally?” I was at the head end for this particular birth, offering encouragement and pushing the monitor into the poor woman’s abdomen so that we had some sort of idea how her…
So this post is a bit of a repeat of before – sorry I’m not being very original. But our book is now on Amazon and free this weekend so just wanted to repeat……… As I have said before…. I trained to be a midwife around 10 years ago. I started as soon as our…
When I was first interested in midwifery I joined lots of groups dedicated to a vision of true midwifery – radical midwives, real midwives, grassroot midwives. Basically midwives who felt that the medical model of childbirth had taken over and women needed to connect and trust their bodies. I want to stress I feel strongly…
“Sorry but are you a midwife? You delivered my baby didn’t you!” She looks so pleased. So pleased to see me. Have you any idea how lovely it is for complete strangers to be pleased to see you? It gives you a warm nice feeling inside – unfortunately accompanied by an icy dread because she…
Having meandered around the jobs market for a long time before coming to midwifery I’m quite used to the phrase “good at working in a team”. In many a job interview I’ve bleated on about good communication skills and respect for others. NHS job adverts always request good team workers – it’s probably on some…
Most of my shift had been really nice. That does happen sometimes. Maybe about once in 20 shifts. Just due to the random statistical distribution sometimes there are just not that many women going into labour. I was on the antenatal ward and only had two women to look after. I was enjoying having the…
There is, of course, one momentous positive about being a midwife. It’s such an obvious one that it almost goes unmentioned a lot of the time in midwifery circles. Yes, it’s lovely to help to empower women; yeah, it’s great to be an autonomous professional and all the other stuff but really, honestly, it’s pretty…
So on the post natal ward yesterday. An average kind of a shift – not too dreadful but my urine still looked like lucozade when I finally went to the loo so obviously fairly busy. I had managed to discharge a couple and thought I wouldn’t hear from them when they buzzed and said they…
I’m not always very good at breastfeeding support – it requires lots of patience and time. I have the patience but often on a postnatal ward I’m very short on time but it’s probably the most important thing to get right for new parents. So many babies I come across have this weird instinct to…