Proactive Support of Labor is a carefully orchestrated and audited team approach involving the laboring woman, nurse, midwife, and obstetrician committed to a safe and normal delivery. Its disciplined, evidence-based policies provide the expertise for adequate labor support, both emotionally and technically, effectively preventing protracted labors and traumatic deliveries. Unnecessarily long and insufficiently supported labor is the root-cause of avoidable operative delivery and a womans dissatisfaction with the childbirth experience.
Unique
This book is unique in its kind as it discusses many topics of critical importance for high quality care during labor that are seldom, if ever, addressed in standard textbooks. This innovative approach offers providers a foothold in negotiating the complexity of daily practice and guards them against clinical stalemates, inconsistencies in care, and non-management or mismanagement of labor with provider-induced birth disorders. Step-by-step, evidence-based guidance on good practice and integrated nursing, midwifery, and medical care during labor is given, effectively enhancing professional labor and delivery skills and invariably improving the womans birth experience.
Integral approach
All aspects of normal and abnormal labor and delivery are discussed, but emphasis is placed on redefining basic birth-parameters, reinterpretation of fundamental physiological data, correct diagnosis, hard clinical evidence, and strict adherence to logic. This integral approach results in evidence-based guidelines for prelabor patient education, emotional support, pain relief, and well-defined birth-planning - including fetal and maternal monitoring - using strictly defined causal diagnoses in abnormal labor that dictate timely corrective measures. Correct diagnosis is the most important single issue in responsible birth care and critical for meaningful audit. Cause and effect need to be explored if progress is to be made. Continual audit of all diagnoses, procedures and relevant outcomes - including maternal satisfaction with the labor experience - is another essential component of the system. It leaves no aspect of high quality care untouched.
Proactive Support of Labor is the key to a normal, safe and rewarding delivery. The overall birth-plan promotes team spirit between obstetricians, midwives and nurses, good communication, and sound labor ward organization. This approach effectively bridges the destructive gaps between obstetrics and midwifery care. The fail-safe procedures strike a new balance between natural birth and intervention and invariably enhance women’s satisfaction with childbirth. This thought-provoking book will be essential reading for obstetricians, midwives, labor room nurses, and trainees, on both sides of the ocean. Although professional language is used, the text should be readily understandable to an educated lay-audience.
