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Mother-Friendly Chilbdirth Services

The Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS) is a collaborative group of broad spectrum maternity care providers in the USA. They have been working to develop better services through the use of a tool “The Ten Steps of Mother Friendly Care” loosely modelled on the UNICEF breastfeeding program of a similar name.

Whilst this tool is geared for birth in an American context, it has wide applicability to other western countries and also many developing nations that have used American birth practices as a model for implementing birth care. CIMS suggests that other countries adapt the tool to include issues relevant to their own services, for example, by inserting a substitution for Step 9 which concerns circumcision, a procedure that is very uncommon in most of the world, but very prevalent in the US.

CIMS has some very useful handouts that can be downloaded for use in prenatal programs and several questionnaires that can be used to evaluate the Mother-Friendliness of various services. The most recent evaluation “Is your perinatal practice Mother-Friendly?” is described in detail in the latest edition of Birth (BIRTH 31:2 June 2004) but is yet to appear on the CIMS web site. Keep an eye out for it - it offers excellent food for thought.

Posted by andrea at July 09, 2004 04:54 PM

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