A woman-centered approach to pregnancy must be flexible enough to address the variety of women's experiences around the world, encompassing medical conditions, cultures and family structures. It must also include women who choose not to carry a pregnancy or experience a miscarriage. This unique woman-centered text explores all these issues and more
The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.
The evaluation of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) by the Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (DCP3) focuses on maternal conditions, childhood illness, and malnutrition. Specifically, the chapters address acute illness and undernutrition in children, principally under age 5. It also covers maternal mortality, morbidity, stillbirth, and influences to pregnancy and pre-pregnancy. Volume 3 focuses on developments since the publication of DCP2 and will also include the transition to older childhood, in particular, the overlap and commonality with the child development volume. The DCP3 evaluation of these conditions produced three key findings: 1. There is significant difficulty in measuring the burden of key conditions such as unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, nonsexually transmitted infections, infertility, and violence against women. 2. Investments in the continuum of care can have significant returns for improved and equitable access, health, poverty, and health systems. 3. There is a large difference in how RMNCH conditions affect different income groups; investments in RMNCH can lessen the disparity in terms of both health and financial risk.
Midwives and other healthcare providers are grappling with the issue of rising intervention rates in childbirth and trying to identify ways to reverse the trend. It is increasingly accepted that intervention in childbirth has long-term consequences for women and their children. Birth Territory provides practical, evidence-based ideas for restructuring the birth territory to facilitate normal birth. Links new research findings to birth environments and outcomes. Describes the elements of an ideal birthing environment. Suggests how to modify existing maternity services to achieve optimal results. Investigates the links between the experiences of women and babies, and outcomes. Explores the effects of legal and socio-political factors.
Endorsed by the Australian College of Midwives and The Royal College of Midwives Midwifery Continuity of Care is a robust 'how to' guide to establishing midwifery continuity of care. Written by a team of international experts in their field, this book highlights lessons learned to help develop new ways of planning, implementing, evaluating and sustaining midwifery continuity of care for the benefit of women, babies and communities. - Summarises the evidence for midwifery continuity of care to support policy makers, commissioners of maternity services and health service executives with their implementation of midwifery continuity of care - Practical real world examples, stories and experiences to bring to life the diversity of ways that midwifery continuity of care can be implemented - Highlights a range of issues for managers and leaders to be aware of, including organisational, industrial and safety and quality issues - Explores how building alliances can enable midwifery continuity of care to flourish, addressing scaling up and sustainability Evolve Student and Faculty Resources: - eBook on VitalSource - An inspirational video interview with author, Jane Sandall
Patient-centered medicine is not an illness-centered, a physician-centered, or a hospital-centered medicine approach. In this book, it is aimed at presenting an approach to patient-centered medicine from the beginning of life to the end of life. As indicated by W. Osler, "It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has." In our day, if the physicians and healthcare professionals could consider more than the diseased organ and provide healthcare by comforting the patients by respecting their values, beliefs, needs, and preferences; informing them and their relatives at every stage; and comforting the patients physically by controlling the pain and relieving their worries and fears, patients obeying the rules of physicians would become patients with high adaptation and participation to the treatment.
Within the continuum of reproductive health care, antenatal care provides a platform for important health-care functions, including health promotion, screening and diagnosis, and disease prevention. It has been established that, by implementing timely and appropriate evidence-based practices, antenatal care can save lives. Endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General, this is a comprehensive WHO guideline on routine antenatal care for pregnant women and adolescent girls. It aims to complement existing WHO guidelines on the management of specific pregnancy-related complications. The guidance captures the complex nature of the antenatal care issues surrounding healthcare practices and delivery, and prioritizes person-centered health and well-being --- not only the prevention of death and morbidity --- in accordance with a human rights-based approach.
There is a global crisis in maternal health care for black women. In the United States, black women are over three times more likely to perish from pregnancy-related complications than white women; their babies are half as likely to survive the first year. Many black women experience policing, coercion, and disempowerment during pregnancy and childbirth and are disconnected from alternative birthing traditions. This book places black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternity system and foregrounds black women's agency in the emerging birth justice movement. Mixing scholarly, activist, and personal perspectives, the book shows readers how they too can change lives, one birth at a time.
This up-to-date, comprehensive and consolidated guideline on essential intrapartum care brings together new and existing WHO recommendations that, when delivered as a package, will ensure good-quality and evidence-based care irrespective of the setting or level of health care. The recommendations presented in this guideline are neither country nor region specific and acknowledge the variations that exist globally as to the level of available health services within and between countries. The guideline highlights the importance of woman-centered care to optimize the experience of labor and childbirth for women and their babies through a holistic, human rights-based approach. It introduces a global model of intrapartum care, which takes into account the complexity and diverse nature of prevailing models of care and contemporary practice. The recommendations in this guideline are intended to inform the development of relevant national- and local-level health policies and clinical protocols. Therefore, the target audience includes national and local public health policy-makers, implementers and managers of maternal and child health programs, health care facility managers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), professional societies involved in the planning and management of maternal and child health services, health care professionals (including nurses, midwives, general medical practitioners and obstetricians) and academic staff involved in training health care professionals.
