Immediate, uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding after birth: A cross-sectional electronic survey.

Objective: To determine the incidence of immediate, uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding after birth; and which factors are associated with it.

Design: Cross-sectional e-survey was developed and piloted prior to distribution. Sampling was purposive and included snowball sampling.

The Milky Way educational and support programme: Structure, content and strategies.

Background: Health professionals have put much effort into supporting women to continue breastfeeding up to six months and beyond. The majority of those efforts have not been successful for primiparous women. Primiparous women who engaged in the Milky Way Programme had an improvement in breastfeeding rates of almost 50% at six months when compared to women in a control group.

Midwifery students experience of teamwork projects involving mark-related peer feedback.

Background: Lack of teamwork skills among health care professionals endangers patients and enables workplace bullying. Individual teamwork skills are increasingly being assessed in the undergraduate health courses but rarely defined, made explicit or taught. To remedy these deficiencies we introduced a longitudinal educational strategy across all three years of the Bachelor of Midwifery program.

Expert validation of a teamwork assessment rubric: A modified Delphi study.

Background: Teamwork is a 'soft skill' employability competence desired by employers. Poor teamwork skills in healthcare have an impact on adverse outcomes. Teamwork skills are rarely the focus of teaching and assessment in undergraduate courses.

Supporting women to achieve breastfeeding to six months postpartum - The theoretical foundations of a successful program.

Background: Although the benefits of breastfeeding to six months are well-established, only about half of Australian women succeed. The factors associated with successful breastfeeding are rarely translated into effective interventions. A new educational and support program, called the Milky Way program has been demonstrated to be effective in supporting women to achieve prolonged breastfeeding.

The development of a rubric for peer assessment of individual teamwork skills in undergraduate midwifery students.

Background: Poor teamwork is cited as one of the major root causes of adverse events in healthcare. Bullying, resulting in illness for staff, is an expression of poor teamwork skills. Despite this knowledge, poor teamwork persists in healthcare and teamwork skills are rarely the focus of teaching and assessment in undergraduate health courses.

Increasing breastfeeding rates to six months among nulliparous women: a quasi-experimental study.

Objective: the aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a multiphased midwifery intervention called the 'Milky Way' on any breastfeeding rates until six months.

Design: a quasi-experimental study with two groups: standard care and intervention.

Setting: a tertiary, metropolitan hospital in Sydney, Australia.

Midwifery students' evaluation of team-based academic assignments involving peer-marking.

Background: Midwives should be skilled team workers in maternity units and in group practices. Poor teamwork skills are a significant cause of adverse maternity care outcomes. Despite Australian and International regulatory requirements that all midwifery graduates are competent in teamwork, the systematic teaching and assessment of teamwork skills is lacking in higher education.

A feminist critique of foundational nursing research and theory on transition to motherhood.

Question: is using 'transition to motherhood theory' the best way to guide midwives in providing woman-centred care?

Background: contemporary research about changes to women's embodied sense of self during childbearing is influenced by foundational research and theory about the transition to motherhood. Rubin and Mercer are two key nursing authors whose work on transition to motherhood theory still shapes the ways in which a woman's experience of change during childbearing is understood in midwifery.

Methods: using a feminist post-structural framework, Rubin and Mercer's theory and research is described, critiqued and discussed.

Including the nonrational is sensible midwifery.

Since the subordination of midwifery by medicine and nursing in the 19th and 20th centuries the standard approach to childbirth has been dominated by rationality. This approach proceeds by creating dichotomies and then prioritising one half of the dichotomy whilst rejecting the opposite term. Rationality itself is prioritised, for example, by contrasting it with the rejected opposite: irrationality.

Birth Territory: a theory for midwifery practice.

The theory of Birth Territory describes, explains and predicts the relationships between the environment of the individual birth room, issues of power and control, and the way the woman experiences labour physiologically and emotionally. The theory was synthesised inductively from empirical data generated by the authors in their roles as midwives and researchers. It takes a critical post-structural feminist perspective and expands on some of the ideas of Michel Foucault.

Trusting enough to be out of control: a pilot study of women's sense of self during childbirth.

The findings of a pilot study undertaken to determine what features of childbirth have a positive effect on women's sense of self are presented in this paper. This research contrasted the midwifery and medical models of maternity care using feminist constructivism, personal narrative and a thematic analysis. Using theory that is strongly grounded in empirical data, this paper outlines the influence of features inherent in the woman's experience of childbirth that have been theoretically linked to how women feel about themselves.

The impact of childbirth experiences on women's sense of self: a review of the literature.

This paper presents a review of the literature that informed research undertaken to determine what features of childbirth have a positive effect on women's sense of self. The literature looked at control: of women or with women, trusting relationships, balancing self-empathy, self understanding through an instinctual response, altered concious states, childbirth and mother/baby relationships.

Planned homebirths in Victoria, 1995-1998.

This paper reports and comments on quantitative aspects of 440 planned homebirths attended by registered midwives in Victoria during the three years studied, 1995-1998. The spontaneous labour rate was 96.4%, and 91.