What does Covid-19 Mean for Midwifery?

What does Covid-19 Mean for Midwifery?

Midwifery is in higher demand than ever before! Covid-19 has made families realize that hospital means “sick house” and not the best place to be delivering normal, healthy babies. We have been given an immense opportunity to fill a need with the pandemic and need to take advantage of the midwifery momentum at play.

Speak and email with your local government representatives. This crisis is a time for barriers to practice and birth center regulations to be relaxed so that midwifery can care for families to their full scope safely. Having a need for physician collaboration to practice and write prescriptions only makes midwifery harder for families to find, not improve outcomes. Midwifery has a due obligation to advocate for our families within community and on a state level. 

Creating a sound running midwifery business is more needed than ever! We need to have extra financial reserves to write these waves on insurance reimbursement delays, increase costs for personal protection for staff, and high prices of routine supplies due to break downs in shipping and business functions from Covid-19. Midwifery businesses need to be thriving during this pandemic, not struggling to stay afloat. 

Having a student with you to grow our midwifery community during these busy times is even more needed than ever. It is our duty to pass on our knowledge to the next generation of midwives and have more midwifery practices in the future. As more as more midwives are retiring and getting burnt out, we need to work together and strengthen our midwifery businesses, not compete with each other. Provide back up coverage for each other. Help prevent professional burnout to our birth colleagues.

Get creative with local zoning about turning a hotel or bed and breakfast home into a birth center for midwifery community to pull their home birth clients together and deliver at the same location. Buy supplies in bulk with other midwifery practices. AABC has great blogs of midwifery practices already doing this! We have many options to improve our practices while still giving great care. There are so many women actively looking for out of hospital births and midwives needs to find creative ways to handle the pandemic to serve them all.