Mother-friendly hospitals and birthing centers

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Carolyn Rafferty, RN, BSN

Nurse and patient advocate Carolyn Rafferty, RN, BSN, can answer your childbirth questions! Send them to her here.

The nurse answers:
"Mother-friendly" is a term that has been applied to maternity care in hospitals that reflects the best information from all the research available as to how women and families should be treated during labor and birth.

A group of professional health organizations, authors and individuals got together and reviewed all the research findings along with the World Health Organization recommendations and developed the "gold standard" of maternity care; the Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative (MFCI). Individuals can find out more about the MFCI by visiting www.motherfriendly.org.

Many organizations are promoting this "gold standard" as the way for women and families to reclaim their right to normal birth with interventions only applied as truly medically necessary.

Hospitals that have been designated as Mother-Friendly are hospitals that have been through a vigorous self-assessment process to see how they compare to the MFCI "gold standard". Even some maternity nurses are assessing their own care in accordance with the MFCI and making every attempt to provide women with mother-friendly nursing care. All women have a right to this "gold standard" of maternity care.

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About the author: Carolyn Rafferty is the mother of four children and two foster children as well as a labor and delivery nurse. Carolyn brings not only her professional medical knowledge to SheKnows.com but also her diverse personal childbearing experiences. She has had battles with infertility and miscarriage, and then experienced three natural childbirths and an emergent cesarean birth of a preterm baby who spent six weeks in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. She has experienced hospital birth and out of hospital-birth center birth both as a nurse and as a mother. Carolyn feels so strongly that maternity care should be more mother and baby friendly that she co-founded a national nursing organization to work toward that goal. She feels passionately that women can only have reproductive options if they are truly informed. She supports nurses that share her passion for patient advocacy by serving as the Executive Director of the Association of Nurse Advocates for Childbirth Solutions (www.anacs.org) and volunteering for the Coalition to Improve Maternity Services (CIMS)(www.motherfriendly.org.) You can e-mail her childbirth-related questions to CRaffertyRNBSN@sheknows.com.

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