The past two weeks I have worked at northshore maternity and national womens community midwives. During my week at northshore it was incredibly busy and understaffed. I also remember thinking at times, where has the midwifery gone? We were so busy rushing around trying to provide safe and quality care to the women, but that fact is I feel we were too busy, with too larger case loads to provide true midwifery care. I cared for many day 1-2 sections, women with large blood losses requiring blood transfusions, a secondary PP and there was a woman with confirmed H1N1 on the ward who was unstable – but HDU wouldn’t allow her to be transferred around, and many other complex situations that really challenged my competence, knowledge and practice reasoning.
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She had just come over from the islands and had no records with her. It was interesting to see how information was gathered and how we had to try paint a picture. We did the normal booking visit and gathered her history, during this time we were able to tailor our communication to her to ensure she was understanding what were were saying. For example what a smear test was, and when the midwife asked if anyone had diabetes and was on insulin, I reitterated it in a different way asking if anyone had to give themselvs injections for their diabetes – which she understood. Her EDD was only a rough estimate as we did not have an LMP or any early scans, only one she had had the previous week in new zealand. The midwife and myself discussed her case and our theories around how her EDD could be wrong, e.g was their growth resistriction that perhaps could affect her EDD. We discussed another scan in a months time would help to paint a better picture. We communicated this to the woman during her visit and she reported she had an early scan over in the islands. She did not know the name of the practice where she had it done, and said they didn’t provide her with any information except that she was having a baby
She had just come over from the islands and had no records with her. It was interesting to see how information was gathered and how we had to try paint a picture. We did the normal booking visit and gathered her history, during this time we were able to tailor our communication to her to ensure she was understanding what were were saying. For example what a smear test was, and when the midwife asked if anyone had diabetes and was on insulin, I reitterated it in a different way asking if anyone had to give themselvs injections for their diabetes – which she understood. Her EDD was only a rough estimate as we did not have an LMP or any early scans, only one she had had the previous week in new zealand. The midwife and myself discussed her case and our theories around how her EDD could be wrong, e.g was their growth resistriction that perhaps could affect her EDD. We discussed another scan in a months time would help to paint a better picture. We communicated this to the woman during her visit and she reported she had an early scan over in the islands. She did not know the name of the practice where she had it done, and said they didn’t provide her with any information except that she was having a baby