Having a baby is one of the sweetest experiences in the world. Nothing can compare to the act of bringing a new life into the world, seeing that sweet little face and knowing that it will forever change your life. To make the experience easier on both mother and child, triage and midwifery ensure that childbearing mothers and their little ones are well taken care of.
What Does a Midwife Do?
A midwife’s role is to care for a pregnant woman and her baby during pregnancy, labor, delivery, and a specific postpartum period. While they can provide general health care services such as health coaching and routine exams (even assisting with treating common maladies like flu and the common cold), they chiefly serve as specialists as a baby is brought into the world.
What Is Telephone Triage in Maternity Care?
In any medical setting, prioritizing the care patients need is an important part of keeping things organized and helping as many people as possible receive care. This process, known as triage, helps medical staff know which patients to attend to most urgently.
Triage, especially over the telephone, is also beneficial for patients, even in mundane ways. A triage phone call helps a patient determine whether or not they should even come in for medical care or if their conditions are better treated at home. A telephone triage nurse can determine the urgency of a patient’s medical issue, the appropriate location to send the patient if he or she needs to be seen, the level of provider response called for, and the timing of appointment scheduling.
Traditional triage and telephone triage are also beneficial in maternity settings. In hospital settings, a Maternity Triage Unit is designed to assess and assist women between 20 weeks into their pregnancy and six weeks post-delivery. It is especially beneficial for those women who have urgent medical complaints regarding pregnancy and delivery.
What Does a Triage Midwife Do?
As mentioned above, midwives specialize in all maternity-related advice and care. That includes triage and assisting over the phone. The telephone is actually a powerful tool for childbearing women, as many such do not have ready access to healthcare via other means. Triage and midwifery includes listening to the concerns of women who call in and assessing them using standard triage protocols.
Sometimes the results are limited to instruction and advice given over the phone, while in other cases midwives may encourage the mother to come into a medical facility for further assessment or healthcare. The midwife can provide recommendations for facilities or alternative care and assist in appointment scheduling. The goal of a triage and midwifery call is always to provide support and to conduct an assessment that will further the mother’s health and the health of her child.
To this end, triage midwives should display empathy and patience to help pregnant mothers through what can be a very anxious time. Midwives should exhibit excellent interpersonal and communication skills in addition to sufficient medical training and expertise. While ever-developing technology makes the triage process more streamlined and accessible, nothing can replace a midwife who really cares.
The Difficulties of Triage and Midwifery
Telephone triage can be a powerful tool in determining a childbearing mother’s concerns and offering recommendations for care in an appropriate, accurate, and timely manner. However, the union of triage and midwifery is not without its challenges.
For one thing, the telephone triage process is often an unacknowledged part of a midwife’s responsibilities. A study published in 2019 documented that 83% of midwives respond to 2–5 telephone calls per shift, though a significantly smaller group, only 11.7% of reporting midwives, indicated that the process was included in their workloads.
Whether it is acknowledged or not, telephone triage increases midwives’ workloads, sometimes to the detriment of other aspects of the work. Triage phone calls take a good amount of time in order to provide sufficient care, and the sometimes distracting environment in which midwives work can impede the ability to make clear decisions and collect information properly.
Proper training in telephone triage is not always available, with 84% of the midwives observed in the study reporting no training at all. This is understandably a source of anxiety and concern—indicated by 73% of midwives surveyed—especially among those with few years of experience. Such professionals want to “get it right” and meet expectations but do not feel they have received the resources necessary to do so.
Overall, it comes down to the fact that there is much that still needs to be explored in the realm of triage and midwifery. The rewards are high, and strides to help midwives be more successful in triage practices should be prioritized.
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