Research on midwives in Britain ‘disquieting’

Press, 7 May 1984, Page 8

Research on midwives in Britain ‘disquieting’

A British survey on the attitudes of midwives will not make pleasant reading for expectant mothers in Britain. No similar study has been done in New Zealand, but may be stimulated by this research.

To a man who will never have to go through it, child birth has always sounded a horribly painful experience. Putting aside all the emotional and psychological trimmings, on the physical level it just has to hurt.

Many techniques are used to try to lessen the hurt, and in the provision of support and comfort over the years no group has seemed to rank higher than the midwives.

That was what they seemed to be there for, as well as helping ensure a safe delivery. But a study reported in

the “British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology” found differently. It was by two psychologists at Sheffield University, Drs C. Bradley and C. Brewin, and an obstetrician, Dr S. Duncan. They gave questionnaires to 78 women attending a large general hospital, and similar questionnaires to the 28 midwives attending them. Both patients and midwives were asked to rate the women’s experience of labour and delivery on several scales, and to say whether and how the woman had tried to control her discomfort. The results showed quite dramatic discrepancies between the perceptions of the two groups of the experience of birth. Midwives rated the

women as feeling significantly more pleasant, better, more relaxed, more comfortable, more in control and less emotional, than the women rated themselves. Most of the women who said they had used techniques such as breathing and relaxation to control their pain had thought they did so some or most of the time.

But the midwives thought that the majority of women had hardly been successful at all. The researchers offered two possible explanations for the rosier view of child birth held by midwives:

© Many compared the individual labour with other labours they had seen. In comparison with a really difficult labour, the average labour might seem rela-

lively comfortable and pleasant. For the woman on the other hand, labour would probably be one of the most painful and uncomfortable experiences of her life. @ Midwives might be less distressed by seeing women undergo labour if they could minimise it, so reducing the obligation on them to take some remedial action. The researchers described the disagreement between the women undergoing child birth and the midwives as “disquieting.” They said the evidence from this and other studies suggested: “That nursing staff tend to think in stereotypes and misperceive the subjective experiences of individual patients.” - OLIVER RIDDELL