Pregnancy & Baby Index: Pregnancy - Experts: Birth: Mother-friendly hospitals and birthing centers
Mother-friendly hospitals and birthing centers
Carolyn Rafferty, RN, BSN
Nurse and patient advocate Carolyn Rafferty, RN, BSN, can answer your childbirth questions! Send them to her here.
Your question:
I heard something about a hospital being "mother-friendly" what
does this mean?
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.