Promoting Normal Birth: Developing Practice through Action Learning

Project leader:

Julia Boon

Location:

Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust

Summary of initiative:

To enable women to labour in less medical environments and achieve their birth potential, midwives need to be skilled in supporting women and confident in their skills and knowledge of normal birth processes. Midwives are already experts in providing high quality midwifery care to pregnant women and their partners. However, some midwives have been practising in a high-risk obstetric environment for a long time and are therefore been offered the opportunity to reinforce and update their knowledge and skills in promoting normal birth ahead of the opening of a birth centre in 2007.

To support midwives with a change in their practice, a practice development project using action learning has been developed. This process will facilitate a group of community midwives to critically reflect and learn from practice in a supportive environment (McGill and Brockbank, 2004), thereby enabling them to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence to practice in a birth centre environment.

References:

McGill, I and Brockbank, A. (2004) The Action Learning Handbook. RoutledgeFalmer: London.

For further information about this project please contact: juliamboon@yahoo.co.uk

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