Tagged / Dr. Rachel Arnold

This Sunday is a midwifery day

Today Sunday 21st November was a midwifery dominated day today.  This lunchtime a interdisciplinary team from CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health) at BU and the University of Exeter submitted a research proposal to the ICM (International Confederation of Midwives) on Midwife-Led Birthing Centres in Low- and Middle-Income  Countries.   As a personal observation: whoever thought that setting the submission deadline for a Sunday was a good idea has no respect for researchers’ work-life balance!

This afternoon many of us attended the  March with Midwives vigils which were held nationwide in the UK to highlight issues with midwifery staffing and working conditions.  The March with Midwives vigil took place in 50 towns and cities, as a vigil to make the general public and politicians aware about the maternity crisis.  In Poole Park it attracted over fifty people.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH

BMC blog on latest HSS paper

Dr. Rachel Arnold’s recent paper in BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth was highlighted in a blog promoted by the publisher.  The paper ‘Villains or victims? An ethnography of Afghan maternity staff and the challenge of high quality respectful care‘ reports on the everyday lives of maternal healthcare providers working in a tertiary maternity hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan (1). BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth is an Open Access journal so the paper is available free of charge to anybody in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) with an internet connection.  The aim was to understand the staff’s notions of care, their varying levels of commitment to providing care for women in childbirth, and the obstacles and dilemmas that affected standards, and thereby gain insight into their contributions to respectful maternity care, whether as ‘villains’ or as ‘victims.’

Dr. Arnold is Postdoctoral Midwifery Researcher in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH).  This is the third paper from Rachel’s excellent PhD project, the previous two papers appeared in BJOG and Social Science & Medicine (2-3).

Click here for BMC Blog post:

Villains or victims? The role of maternity staff in decreasing or enhancing respectful care

Reference:

  1. Arnold, R., van Teijlingen, E., Ryan, K., Holloway, I. (2019) Villains or victims? An ethnography of Afghan maternity staff and the challenge of high quality respectful care, BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth 19 :307 https://rdcu.be/bPqlj
  2. Arnold R., van Teijlingen E, Ryan K., Holloway I. (2015) Understanding Afghan health care providers: Qualitative study of culture of care in Kabul maternity hospital, BJOG 122: 260-267.
  3. Arnold, R., van Teijlingen, E., Ryan, K., Holloway, I. (2018) Parallel worlds: an ethnography of care in an Afghan maternity hospital, Social Science & Medicine 126:33-40.