What’s a midwife to do when 24 hour/ 7 day labor and birth work is no longer feasible?
Look forward to connecting with as many postpartum families after the birth of their babies and/or to newly pregnant folk, as my part-time capacity allows!
Initial Early Pregnancy Care and After Birth Postpartum and Newborn Care: are the 2 services I now offer.
Each service is a phase of care that has a mixture of scheduled and unscheduled remote and in-person visits, along with email communication.
Currently, I am booking pregnant folk, whose babies are due in January, 2024 onwards into my postpartum practice.
I have capacity at this time for folk, who have just discovered that they are pregnant, who had their last period in
September- October-November, 2023 and who are due in June- July -August 2024 onwards.
I am grateful for over 1000 + babies and families that my full-service practice was privileged to participate in their journeys from 1998 until 2021. While I miss attending birth, I am delighted that midwifery experience and the other skills that midwives have outside of labor and birth are now recognised within our healthcare system and utilized as part of a hospital and health region’s team-based perinatal services approach. Consequently, I am excited to confidently launch my part-time consultant practice, which offers two MSP covered midwifery primary care services: Initial Early Pregnancy Care and After Birth Postpartum and Newborn Care.
Folk can either self-refer during their pregnancy or be referred by other providers.
My postpartum services include: lactation, infant feeding and development, c-section recovery, contraception and early parenting support.
I am grateful to Dr Jolene Kennet ND, who has provided me an opportunity to grow my new venture out of her lovely office clinic space in Shipyards Health lower Lonsdale.
You will find me there undertaking sceheduled initial early prenatal and postpartum in-person office appointments two Wednesdays a month between 2-8 pm. As my capacity grows, so my Wednesday shifts will grow to three or four a month.
I appreciate the 76 + families, who I have served since November 2021. They showed me that there is a need for initial early pregnancy care and for after birth postpartum care/
My gratitude also goes to my Vancouver and Lionsgate Hospital family doctor, obstetrician, pediatrician, nurse and midwife colleagues for their support, positive feedback and their collaborative attitude over the past 2 years, since I needed to find ways to continue working and to be of service in my community, without offering birth services.
Their attitude led to the development of communication processes and agreements, which now facilitate a seamless client-patient transfer of care from my initial prenatal service into my midwife or doctor colleagues’ practices for ongoing prenatal, labor and birth care. Including a process for booking into my postpartum afterbirth services.
My appreciation also extends to my professional bodies: The Midwives Association of BC and BC College of Nurses and Midwives and to other colleagues throughout the province, who helped me clarify and become certain about continuing to offer the bookends of my previous full-service midwifery practice, and who validated utilizing midiwfery primary care prenatal, postpartum and newborn care, as a part of the perinatal servcies offered, integrated, supported and funded within a healthcare region.
Thirdly, my appreciation extends to Mike Caroll , who hosts my website and set up the current word press version. He then patiently guided me to learn how to update the site myself and waited until I was ready to launch my anti-brand site on the 16 November, 2023.
I trust that who I am, what folk can expect from me, how the two services that I offer can be accessed and what happens for ongoing care in between the services I offer is communicated throughout the site and that folk find the site useful.
Given that my office appointment days and times are on Wednesday only and are limited by my capacity, and because I have to prioritise Thursday through Tuesday home visits to newborn babies and their parents that have just been discharged from hospital, or to a family that is dealing with an unexpected challenge.
I appreciate that my clients form a partnership with me, communicate their needs and are flexible about their appointments.
There are weekends too that I will be unavailable to my clientele, who are informed that I am away and of a coverage plan that I have made with colleagues when needed.
For the past 20 years, I have been fortunate to have worked out of Quayside Village Cohousing foyer office, along with my office assistants and midwife colleagues that worked with me to provide a full-service 24 hour/ 7 day prenatal, labor, birth and postpartum practice, or who provided locum services over the years, so that I could have time away from the practice. This location afforded an established work-site for my community practice to operate seamlessly out of through all the needs and curve-balls that came our way, including a pandemic.
Since the pandemic, it has been lonely working out of Quayside office foyer and challenging to know what to do next, especially when I realised that I could no longer provide 24hour/ 7days labor and birth services and that I needed to find and build a part-time service that no longer included birth services. There was much uncertainty to work through, established ways of working to let go and new ways forward that needed to be discovered and embraced.
I now consider that I am blessed with innovative, flexible solutions that allow me to deliver midwifery experience and skills outside of labor and birth in my community, in a consultant capacity via inperson visits either from Shipyards Health on Wednesdays, or in clients homes on Thursday to Tuesday in the community, and via remote visits from my car, which is my travelling office and/or from my Quayside admin home office on Wednesday mornings.
This part time consultant service allows me to still be present to pregnant folk in the beginning of their pregnancies and to parents taking home their newborn babies. I consider that path set at the beginning of pregnancy can make a difference to what happens afterwards.
Adding a new member into the family is an emotional transition for the entire family, in which I am privileged to bear witness and delighted to play a supportive and mindful role at the beginning of pregnancy, as well as after birth until 6-8 weeks postpartum.
I support baby feeding however, a person chooses and can provide education about paced bottle-feeding. For those families that want human milk to nourish their newborn, I love assisting with the dance of breastfeeding and their lactation needs.
Babies have no understanding of words when they are born. They are instinctual and conscious beings.
There is an unspoken, energetic, emotional chemistry that connects babies and their parents, which is awesome to observe and to foster.
Whether they are human babies bonding and having their needs met by their parents,
or wild animal babies with their parents in the African wilderness…