Midwifery Roles and Responsibilities in Hospital

Introduction:

Midwife or midwives are specialists in normal pregnancy and birth. Their role is to look after pregnant women and their babies throughout a phase of antenatal care, during labor and birth, and for up to 28 days after the baby has been born. They provide all necessary professional care and services during normal pregnancy and childbirth.

What Exactly is a Midwife?

A midwife is a health care professional who provides health care services for women including gynecological examinations, contraceptive counseling, prescriptions, and labor and delivery care. The midwife provides expert specialized care during labor, delivery and after birth so that midwife unique.

11 Duties and Responsibilities of Midwives:

Various roles and responsibilities of a midwife have presented the below:

1. Caregiver:

Midwives provide high quality antenatal and postnatal care to maximize the women’s health during and after pregnancy, detect problems early and manage or refer for any complications.

2. Coordinator:  

Midwives coordinate care for all women. Coordinator ensures holistic, voluntary, and social services for pregnant women when appropriate so that every women’s birth experience regardless of risk factor.

3. Leader: 

The role of a leader is to plan, provide, and review a women’s care, with her input and agreement, from the initial antenatal assessment through to the postnatal period. Midwife’s leading role reduces admission to hospital and results in significantly less intervention during birth.

4. Communicator:

As a communicator, the midwives understand the effectiveness of communication.  It helps to develop a trust relationship with pregnant women and family members. The midwife has to communicate effectively with pregnant women and family members as well as others so that they can share their all problems.

5. Manager:  

The manager is a great role for the midwife. Midwives manage all the circumstances where appropriate and can recognize and refer women to obstetricians and other specialists at a time when necessary.

6. Educator:

As an educator, midwives provide high quality, culturally sensitive health education to promote healthy, helpful family life, and positive parenting.

7. Counselor:

Midwives provide information and counsel pregnant women on prenatal self-care including nutrition, hygiene, breastfeeding, and danger signs in pregnancy and childbirth.

8. Family planner:

They also counsel people as a family planner. They provide all information about all kinds of family planning methods and help couples to take decisions.

 9. Adviser:

Midwives advise on the development of the birth plan and promote the concept of birth preparedness. They also advise on a complicated situation so that it will help them to take decisions.

10. Recordkeeper:

Record keeping is an integral part of midwifery practice. It helps to make the continuity of care easier and to enable identify problems in an early stage.

11. Supervisor:

Supervising and assisting mothers during the antenatal period, monitoring the condition of the fetus, and using their knowledge to identify early signs of complications.

Maria Mona

Maria Khatun Mona is a Founder and Editor of Nursing Exercise Blog. She is a Nursing and Midwifery Expert. Currently she is working as a Registered Nurse at Evercare Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has great passion in writing different articles on Nursing and Midwifery. Mail her at “[email protected]”