Bringing Awareness about Midwives to Arizona.
Supporting Midwives in Arizona to support Families in Arizona.
“Through it all, there have always been midwives” Birth Center Equity
Shared Mission Statement:
The Arizona MLC Team’s MISSION is to center midwives as primary care providers that eliminate barriers, prevent harm, and implement healing practices that improve care and outcomes for birthing and postpartum families in the community.
Shared Vision Statement:
The Arizona MLC Team’s VISION is to educate families on what a midwife is and to ensure that all families can have both physical and financial access to midwifery care if they so desire. We believe that midwives should be valued and respected for their work and need to be compensated & positioned accordingly.
Learning about Midwives
Midwives are trained health care providers who offer a wide range of essential reproductive and sexual health care services based on their scope of practice, from birth and newborn care to Pap tests and contraceptive care.
In the United States, there are various types of midwives, ensuring that every family can have the midwife that is right for them, whether that be a traditional midwife*, a direct entry midwife such as a Licensed Midwife (LM) Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) or a Certified Midwife (CM) that has completed state or national requirements for certification and licensure, or a Nurse-Midwife (CNM) who is a nurse with an advanced university degree in nursing, with an emphasis on Midwifery. We recognize all pathways for midwives.
Research consistently demonstrates that when midwives play a central role in the provision of maternal care, patients are more satisfied, clinical outcomes for parents and infants improve, and costs decrease.1 Use of midwives is also associated with fewer cesarean sections, lower preterm birth rates, lower episiotomy rates, higher breastfeeding rates, and a greater sense of respect and autonomy for the patient.2
(*traditional midwives who are not licensed, but embraced by their community as a traditional midwife, is generally a midwife from a traditional community or a midwife from a faith based community, who has had generational or traditional training. A midwife who simply choses to be unlicensed, without that context, is not a traditional midwife. This is a cultural and significant distinction)
Arizona Needs More Midwives
The reasons for America’s high-cost, low-quality maternity care are complex. But one rarely acknowledged difference between the U.S. and countries with better outcomes is that they use more midwives. The U.S. has a similar number of OB-GYNs per 1,000 births compared to countries like Britain, the Netherlands, and France. But in those countries, midwives are an integral part of the health care system, outnumbering OB-GYNs 3 to 1.
Why does this model work? A strong midwifery workforce frees up physicians to concentrate on high-risk pregnancies while offering lower-risk pregnant people more personalized care with longer visits and increased psychosocial support, which are typical of the midwifery model of care.
Just as midwifery has been successful abroad, U.S. states with greater midwifery integration into their health care systems have better outcomes, including lower rates of C-sections, preterm births, and neonatal deaths.
(from Stat)
Support for Communities that Midwives can serve
Education happens within the context of a larger community. Our approach extends a vision of care that midwives can provide, given the support of the State of Arizona and our families. By making midwifery more accessible, and sharing the impact midwives can have on improving birth experiences, as well as being a life saving and primary care option.
Contact
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
Email
info@midwives4az.com