Respectful Relationships in the Maternity Service

by Maggie O’Brien (ed.), Ellen Kitson-Reynolds (ed.) This book inspires and acts as a resource for midwives, leaders, managers and students within maternity services who strongly desire to create positive cultures, whilst providing advice to individual professionals about available support. Research, reports, and investigations over many years into maternity services have proven that midwifery culture is sometimes lacking. This results in women, midwives, and student midwives being subjected to disrespectful behaviour including, in some instances, bullying. The consequences of this are that some maternity unit staff are unable to speak up, causing these maternity units to become increasingly unsafe, with high sickness and turnover rates amongst midwives and a high dropout rate among student midwives. These facts are widely documented and recommendations have been made about improving the culture of these units. The book summarises the evidence that a lack of respectful professional behaviour exists and identifies what constitutes bullying both in terms of the researched definition and behaviour. It goes on to explore resolution looking at the importance of safe staffing levels, psychological safety, models of midwifery care, coaching, Schwartz rounds, value-based education and leadership. This book also focuses on compassionate leadership, using case studies of where culture change has been achieved. This book is unique in addressing the gap in the literature on how to improve the midwifery culture and achieve respectful relationships in maternity services. The authors explore realistic ways, explain the reasons why some maternity units have a positive culture, and identify good practices that currently exist. It is a must-have for midwives, student midwives, educators, maternity health care assistants, nurses and student nurses as well as for all other health professionals and students in leadership and management masters’ programmes.