Helping launch the Maternity Support Survey

What do nurses, doulas and childbirth educators think about their jobs and maternal health outcomes in North America?

Most of the voices you hear talking about North America’s significant maternal health problems come from doctors, midwives, researchers, hospital administrators and mothers. You don’t hear much from the women (and a few men) with their fingers on the pulse of what’s actually going down in labor and delivery departments.  You don’t hear from the nurses massaging backs, starting IVs, hooking up fetal heart monitors and wheeling patients into delivery and operating rooms.  You don’t hear from the doulas providing one-on-one personal support or the childbirth educators teaching women what to expect and techniques to facilitate labor. It’s time somebody started asking a few questions.

That’s why Christine Morton, a research sociologist at Stanford University’s California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (an organization working to improve maternal care and reduce preventable maternal mortality and injury) and her co-investigator Louise Roth, associate professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona are exploring previously un-researched voices in maternal care by surveying doulas, childbirth educators and labor and delivery nurses from the US and Canada. Morton says, “There’s been quite a lot of research on North American maternal health that have primarily focused on how mothers view their care and childbirth outcomes, but so far there’s been no systematic research focused on how nurses, childbirth educators and doulas view their work and current practices in maternity care.  That’s in spite of strong research demonstrating that strong, personal, consistent and skilled support during pregnancy, labor and delivery has a significant impact on the method of delivery, maternal and neonatal health and rates of postpartum depression.”  

The Maternity Support Survey is the first survey to address the perspectives of these three unique maternal health and support careers.  Set to launch in mid-October, the survey includes approximately 175 questions (estimated to take 30 minutes to complete), some directed towards doulas and educators, others towards nurses. Morton says, “Our goal with this survey is to increase our knowledge around women’s maternal health experiences by hearing from the people making vital impacts on their care. It’s been a missed opportunity that nurses, doulas and educators haven’t been included in research.  We haven’t had the conversations with those directly involved about things like, how they perceive their work, their burnout and stress levels, how they stay up to date and how their work has changed in the face of technological advances. Registered nurses have key clinical roles in the information network and direct care of laboring women, but we don’t know anything about their perspectives on the emotional and physical support they provide.  We don’t know how job tensions impact their views of birth or decisions to stay in labor and delivery or how their work is affected by managed care and litigation concerns. We want to know how they perceive things like c-sections, early inductions, oxytocin and epidurals.  What’s it like to balance patient care with electronic charting?  We want to know how many doulas make a living solely attending births and postpartum women and how many combine doula work with other accessory occupations like massage, photography or belly casting.  There’s just so much we don’t know and yet, these people are directly involved.  Their voices should be heard.” 

Who will they survey? 

In addition to several nursing associations including the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN), they’ll send the survey to doulas and childbirth education associations including, Birthing from Within; Lamaze International; International Childbirth Education Association (ICEA); American Academy of Husband Coached Childbirth – The Bradley Method® of Natural Childbirth; International Birth & Wellness Project (was ALACE); BirthWorks; DONA International; Childbirth and Postpartum Professional Association (CAPPA); toLABOR (was ALACE); Health Connect One; International Center for Traditional Childbearing. 

They hope to receive survey results from 20 to 30 percent of these organizations’ members. Graduate students will then use the data for their dissertation research and results will be published in professional and academic journals. 

Operating on a bare bones budget, the Maternity Support Survey needs at least $3000 to cover immediate costs, website domain registration and fees to access members of the organizations listed above. That’s why they’ve set up an IndieGoGo campaign that runs until midnight on Sunday 9/23/2012. So far, they’ve raised over $2000 towards their goal. 

How can you help? 

Donate towards completion and publication of survey results via IndieGoGo before 9/23 or

Send your check to:

University of Arizona Foundation (note in the memo section: in support of Sociology - Maternity Support Survey)
Department of Sociology
C/O Louise Roth
Social Sciences 400
P.O. Box 210027
Tucson, AZ  85721-0027 

If you’re a member of any of the organizations receiving the survey in mid-October, encourage members to spend 30 minutes answering survey questions.