How about having the nurses cover the clock in the labor and delivery
room? Clocks are made by and for adults. They are sometimes useful
tools, but laboring women lose track of time. Babies certainly don't
understand about time, particularly as measured on clocks and the first
meeting between baby and parents cannot be rushed or timed.

Is there medical evidence why all these things need to be done in the
first hour (or all together for that matter)? What happens if they
don't measure the head circumfrence or feed the baby within 60 minutes?
What happens if it all takes 90 or 120 minutes?

I agree that the question is how do we help hospital caregivers take
back (or acquire) the wonder and magic of birth? That is such a loss!
How do we reorient their priorities from the clock to the family being
born? When I teach childbirth classes, I tell fathers not to time every
contraction because labor, even short ones, have a lot of contractions
and their attention is better focused on the person having the
contractions than the clock. They smile when they hear this. I hope it
sticks and they remember it when labor has begun.

Finding a way to work humor into the presentation will help. People
tend to remember what they have laughed at a bit. Also, be realistic
about what you can accomplish in your 15 minutes. If you can get people
thinking, questioning their own behavior and the policies of the
hospitals, if you can get them to ask you for more then you have
accomplished a lot. This will take time, people have to let new ideas
settle in and come back for more before policies and behavior change.
Some people have these ideas in the backs of their minds already. If
you get those people to move those ideas onto a front burner, so it
becomes a topic of conversation, which then puts it in other people's
minds in a serious way, so the conversation can begin and move forward
then you've accomplished a small miracle.

Naomi
--------------------------------
Naomi Bar-Yam Ph.D.
[log in to unmask]

Researcher, Writer, Educator
in Maternal and Child Health
--------------------------------

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