A qualitative study of how caseload midwifery is constituted and experienced by Danish midwives

Implementing continuity of midwife carer – just a friendly face? A realist evaluation

“…For CMC midwives in our study, organisational pressure to perform well [41] combined with micromanagement [42] stifled flexibility and undermined autonomous practice. As has been found elsewhere, lack of support and poor practice arrangements [43,44] counteracted possible benefits and impacted negatively on midwives' wellbeing and sustainability of CMC.…”

“…CMC aims to build relationships through frequent care contacts with the same midwife during a woman's care journey [12]. These relationships result in better clinical outcomes and care experiences for women [36,38,41,[44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] and are thought to work through various mechanisms such as: trust [38, 47-49, 52, 53, 55]; feeling known [49,51,52,56]; feeling empowered or confident [52,53,57], feeling relaxed [52]; emotional support [45,55,58,59]; advocacy [60] and feeling safe [47]. Women in our evaluation said they liked having a relationship with their midwife, 'seeing a friendly face', feeling known and feeling confident in their midwives' abilities.…”

Personal, professional and workplace factors that contribute to burnout in Australian midwives

“…There is a growing body of evidence that supports the notion that flexible activity-based work patterns, even with their on-call component, offer midwives increased opportunities to exert control and autonomy over how they organize their work and family commitments. Such autonomy has been associated with increased satisfaction with work-life balance (Edmondson & Walker, 2014;Jepsen et al, 2016;Newton, McLachlan, Forster, & Willis, 2016).…”

“…Four studies were conducted in Australia (Creedy et al, 2017;Jordan et al, 2013;Mollart, Skinner, Newing, & Foureur, 2011;Newton et al, 2014). Research from other countries included United Kingdom (Sheen, Spiby, & Slade, 2015;Wallbank, 2010;Yoshida & Sandall, 2013), Denmark (Borritz et al, 2006;Jepsen, Mark, Nøhr, Foureur, & Sørensen, 2016), New Zealand (Dixon et al, 2017;Wakelin & Skinner, 2007), Senegal (Rouleau, Fournier, Philibert, Mbengue, & Dumont, 2012), Iran (Esfahani, Mirzaee, Boroumandfar, & Abedi, 2012), Sweden (Hildingsson et al, 2013) and Norway (Henriksen & Lukasse, 2016). Predominantly, two standardized measures of burnout were used: the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) (Maslach & Jackson, 1981) and Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) (Kristensen, Borritz, Villadsen, & Christensen, 2005).…”

The motivation and capacity to go ‘above and beyond’: Qualitative analysis of free-text survey responses in the M@NGO randomised controlled trial of caseload midwifery

“…Furthermore, when the caseload model provides the context for a genuinely caring ongoing relationship, the midwife is motivated to do their utmost (Jepsen et al, 2016). Balanced exchanges between midwife-woman where there is 'give and take' on both sides is emotionally rewarding and affirming both professionally and personally for the midwife (Hunter, 2006).The ability to know the woman's individual circumstances, provide tailored assistance and support, and receive feedback from clients provides immense job satisfaction (Jepsen et al, 2016;Newton et al, 2016). It may be that the caseload model works to attract midwives who are capable of excelling as empowering and endorphic midwives who, once in the model, are motivated to go 'above and beyond' in their provision of one-to-one care.…”