Systematic review and meta-analysis to examine intrapartum interventions, and maternal and neonatal outcomes following immersion in water during labour and waterbirth.

Objectives: Water immersion during labour using a birth pool to achieve relaxation and pain relief during the first and possibly part of the second stage of labour is an increasingly popular care option in several countries. It is used particularly by healthy women who experience a straightforward pregnancy, labour spontaneously at term gestation and plan to give birth in a midwifery led care setting. More women are also choosing to give birth in water.

Systematic Review of Case Reports of Poor Neonatal Outcomes With Water Immersion During Labor and Birth.

Water immersion is a valuable comfort measure in labor, that can be used during the first or second stage of labor. Case reports of adverse outcomes create suspicion about water birth safety, which restricts the availability of water birth in the United States. The objective of this study was to synthesize the information from case reports of adverse water birth events to identify practices associated with these outcomes, and to identify patterns of negative outcomes.

Assimilation of Expert Clinician Into the Academy: A Competency-Based Faculty Development Plan.

Background: As expert clinicians are recruited to academic positions in response to nursing faculty shortages, comprehensive plans are needed for transitioning and role development.

Problem: Schools of nursing often lack infrastructures to support and develop new faculty.

Approach: Team members from an academic-clinical partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs created a competency-based faculty development plan.

Comfort in Labor: "Like Being Able to Exhale".

Comfort is a fundamental human need to seek relief, ease, and transcendence. Comfort is relevant to women in labor who experience intense pain and mixed emotions. The subjective meaning of comfort in labor for women is not fully understood.

Women's psychological experiences of physiological childbirth: a meta-synthesis.

Objective: To synthesise qualitative studies on women's psychological experiences of physiological childbirth.

Design: Meta-synthesis.

Methods: Studies exploring women's psychological experiences of physiological birth using qualitative methods were eligible.

Keeping it together and falling apart: Women's dynamic experience of birth.

Objective: To explore the complexity of women's birth experiences in the context in which they occur and to describe how these influence women's well-being in labor.

Design: Qualitative method with a phenomenological approach, following the analysis principles of van Manen.

Participants And Setting: Eight women from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds in Atlanta, Georgia, United States with a recent, healthy birth were interviewed twice about their experience of the labor journey.

Critical questions: Advancing the health of female Veterans.

Purpose: Women are the fastest growing Veteran population in the United States and many receive all or part of their health care outside of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The purpose of this article is to review the healthcare issues of women Veterans and discuss implications for care.

Data Sources: Review of selected literature, VA resources and guidelines, and expert opinion.

Team process in community-based participatory research on maternity care in the Dominican Republic.

A cross-cultural team consisting of US trained academic midwife researchers, Dominican nurses, and Dominican community leaders have partnered in this international nursing and midwifery community-based participatory research (CBPR) project in the Dominican Republic to understand the community experience with publicly funded maternity services. The purpose of the study was to understand community perceptions of maternity services. This article highlights the activities that the research team carried out during each phase of the research process, and how they established team identity, team trust, and team efficacy.

A community-based participatory research approach to explore community perceptions of the quality of maternal-newborn health services in the Dominican Republic.

Objective: to understand both men's and women's beliefs and attitudes regarding public maternity and newborn services, care and quality.

Design: qualitative, cross-sectional, retrospective study with an observation arm, using community-based participatory research as both the mechanism of enquiry and catalyst for change.

Setting: four urban neighbourhoods in the Dominican Republic, selected in collaboration with the Provincial Medical Public Health Director and the partnering local public hospital.