A mixed-method evaluation of a New Zealand based midwifery education development unit.

The Midwifery Development Education Service was established in the Birthing Unit at Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland New Zealand in 2007. The service is unique in the New Zealand midwifery context for the way it operates as a collaboration between the education and health provider to optimise the clinical learning experience of student midwives. This paper reports on the evaluation of the Midwifery Development Education Service that was undertaken in 2015.

Sustainability and resilience in midwifery: A discussion paper.

Background: midwifery workforce issues are of international concern. Sustainable midwifery practice, and how resilience is a required quality for midwives, have begun to be researched. How these concepts are helpful to midwifery continues to be debated.

Managing infant feeding practices: the competing needs of bulimic mothers and their children.

Aim: This paper seeks to explain how bulimic mothers accommodated infant feeding demands in conjunction with managing their disordered eating practices.

Background: Eating disorders are chronic and disabling illnesses primarily affecting women. There are few qualitative studies describing bulimia in the context of motherhood.

Breast or bottle? Eating disordered childbearing women and infant-feeding decisions.

Debates about infant-feeding methods have intensified in recent years with increasing pressures on women living in industrialized nations to breastfeed their infants. This paper, based on a qualitative study of 16 childbearing women with a pre-existing eating disorder living in the north of England, examines participants' motivations for, and understandings of, infant-feeding decisions and practices. In this study, a small number of participants reported being 'desperate' to formula feed in order to resume practices underpinning their eating disorder and thereby to shed the weight accumulated during pregnancy.

Spiritual midwifery on the farm.

Spiritual midwifery and the whole ethos of natural birth is captured in the atmosphere of The Farm in Tennessee. With remnants of the heyday of the 1970s hippy era, it embodies all that is holistic, spiritual and low-tech, and promotes the physical and emotional wellbeing of each expectant mother.