Women-Centred Care

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Women-centred care can be defined as holistic care that aims to recognise the woman's individualised needs, expectations as well as her right to self-determination. Midwives play an important role in women-centred care by providing evidence-based information while acknowledging the woman's right to make informed decisions about their health and that of their baby. The midwife's role is to build trusting relationships and advocate for the woman, and to ensure her social, emotional, physical, physiological, spiritual and cultural needs are met. "The ICM is a framework that was first developed in 2002. It outlines the minimum set of knowledge, skills and professional behaviours that are required by an individual to use the designation of midwife …show more content…

Category 1 general competencies consider the need to use research to inform practice, to uphold fundamental human rights of individuals when providing midwifery care and to facilitate women to make individualised choices about their care, taking into consideration gender identity, cultural norms and practices while collaborating with women to develop comprehensive plans that respect their preferences and choices. Category 2 competencies are specified for pre-pregnancy and antenatal care. Addressing the skills and behaviours expected of the midwife when delivering quality midwifery care through providing health assessments relating to the birthing person and their fetus, while promoting health and well-being. the framework discusses assessments used to detect complications during pregnancy and the role the midwife provides when supporting a woman through unplanned pregnancy as well as promoting and supporting health behaviours to improve wellbeing and monitoring the progression of pregnancy and assessing fetal well-being. Continuing on, Category 3 competencies are related to assessment and care throughout labour, the role the midwife plays in facilitating safe birth while detecting and managing complications in a mother or …show more content…

The final category explores the competencies specific to continuity of care and addressing health assessments of mother and infant, providing support with breastfeeding, detection of complications and the provision of family planning services. The midwife will have a range of skills and behaviours to facilitate category 4 competencies and these include the ability to provide information to parents relating to providing a safe environment for the baby, the skills to examine the infant at frequent intervals to observe growth and developmental behaviour and to provide follow up care for the woman and her family especially in situations such as stillbirth, neonatal death or serious illness. A key principle of women-centred care is continuity of care. This is care provided by the same midwife, or group of midwives, throughout pregnancy, labour and postnatally. In Australia, "an estimated 10% of women have access to midwifery-led continuity of care. "(Cummins et al., 2019) talk about continuity of

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