OBJECTIVE to develop and validate national competency standards for midwives in Australia. This study was part of a commissioned national research project to articulate the scope of practice of Australian midwives and to develop national competency standards to assist midwives to deliver safe and competent midwifery care. DESIGN a multi-method, staged approach was used to collect data through...

BACKGROUND Maternal nutrition during pregnancy affects the health of the mother and the baby. Midwives are ideally placed to provide nutrition education to pregnant women. There is limited published research evidence of Australian midwives' nutrition knowledge, attitudes and confidence. AIM To investigate Australian midwives' nutrition knowledge, attitudes and confidence in providing nutritio...

BACKGROUND Studies suggest that poor oral health during pregnancy can lead to perinatal complications, such as low birth weight and preterm delivery as well as poor oral health in children. Aim of this study was to assess the German midwives knowledge about oral health and preventive recommendations for pregnant women, infants and young children. METHODS The nationwide online-survey was condu...

BACKGROUND Professional midwives have an important role to play in midwifery training to produce a competent midwife. According to the social learning theory, professional midwives act as role models for students. When allocated for clinical learning experiences in the training hospitals, students will have the opportunity to observe the well-trained, skilled, and experienced professional midwi...

OBJECTIVE to investigate midwives' attitudes and opinions on mode of birth. DESIGN exploratory descriptive study. Data were collected via study-specific questionnaires during 2006. SETTING southeastern Sweden. PARTICIPANTS all midwives working in two counties. FINDINGS regardless of age, experience and working field, the midwives considered a reasonable caesarean rate to be around 11.5 ...

the most common reason for women ceasing breast-feeding were lack of support and appropriate advice. to explore the advice about breast-feeding given by community midwives and compare and contrast their advice in swansea (uk) and shahrekord (iran). data collected through semi-structured interview with a sample of 12 community midwives, 6 from each country. purposive sample was selected as capab...

  Background & aim:The quality of communication between midwives and parturient women is a determinant of maternal satisfaction with midwifery care. Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the communication skills of midwives at maternity wards of Mashhad teaching hospitals in 2014.   Methods:In this descriptive study, 49 midwives, working at Mashhad teaching hospitals, were randomly s...

BACKGROUND Midwives are an influential profession and a key group in informing women about alcohol consumption in pregnancy and its consequences. There are no current quantitative Australian data on midwives' knowledge, attitudes and practice in relation to alcohol consumption during pregnancy and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. We aimed to reduce this knowledge gap by understanding midwives' ...

María Catalina lives in a small village called Áto, about an hour and a half walk from Antigua, a colonial city in the Guatemalan highlands. The region is surrounded by volcanoes, and is an agricultural center for the production of corn and coffee. Catalina looks much older than her 38 years, and is plagued by chronic health problems stemming from a life of poverty and hard physical labor. She ...

This paper focuses on nurses and midwives in Montreal, Halifax, and Saint John in the decades leading up to the introduction of trained nurses. Self-employed (private) nurses are compared with those in hospitals. Overwhelmingly of the working-class, predominantly women, and frequently widows, the nurses were not formally trained, though some midwives were. Comparisons are made between nurses an...