Purpose of the Symposium
1) Discuss the benefits of the Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative (MFCI) for hospitals, clinics, mothers, infants, and clinicians
2) Provide a forum for discussion among nurses, doctors, doulas, childbirth educators, midwives, administrators and others on the challenges and opportunities of implementing mother-friendly care in the clinical or hospital setting.
3) Provide a forum for dissemination of evidence-based best practices for maternity care.
4) Support clinics, hospitals and community-based programs in developing plans of action to shift the thinking in their organizations towards mother-friendly care and develop multidisciplinary coordinated networks of maternity care providers.
5) Practitioners and students of maternity care will obtain an objective understanding of the collision of worldviews and belief systems when the medical and midwifery models of maternity care intersect.
6) Participants will describe how the perinatal community as a whole can best collaborate to provide optimal care for mothers and infants based on the principals of the MFCI and the evidence-based practices available as outlined in the 10 steps of the Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative (MFCI).
Principles of the MFCI are:This comprehensive Report Examines the Science on the Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing and Its Implications for Women, Babies and Maternity Care.
The U.S. maternity care system is missing opportunities to provide better care and use resources more wisely by routinely intervening in labor and delivery in ways that interfere with, instead of promoting, supporting and protecting, innate biological processes that result in healthier outcomes for women and newborns. That is the conclusion of a major new report, Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing: Evidence and Implications for Women, Babies, and Maternity Care. The unprecedented synthesis of scientific research on how hormone systems function from late pregnancy through the early postpartum period concludes that commonly used maternity interventions — such as labor induction, epidural analgesia, and cesarean section — can disturb hormonal processes and interfere with the benefits they offer.
Dr. Buckley will describe ways birth attendants of all kinds -- physicians, nurses, doulas and family members-- can support the laboring woman in such a way that the birth process can unfold naturally as it was designed to do.
Overview of hormonal physiology of childbearing which has evolved over millions of years to optimize reproductive success.
After this session, you will be able to:
