Promoting Healthy Pregnancies Through Perinatal Groups: A Comparison of CenteringPregnancy® Group Prenatal Care and Childbirth Education Classes

Abstract

CenteringPregnancyÒ group prenatal care is growing in popularity and has commonalities with childbirth education classes. In order for leaders of childbirth education classes to best serve their clients' needs, it is important to be aware of new, emerging models of prenatal care such as CenteringPregnancy. This article provides an overview of CenteringPregnancy and similarities and differences between CenteringPregnancy and childbirth education classes. Providers of prenatal education, whether it is within CenteringPregnancy group prenatal care or in childbirth education classes, have a common important aim: promoting positive perinatal outcomes.

"How Can We Talk about Patient-centered Care without Patients at the Table?" Lessons Learned from Patient Advisory Councils

“…This stands in contrast with other patient group programs such as Centering Pregnancy or group visits for chronic pain, which provide formal facilitation training to providers or staff. 14,15 As PACs become more common in the primary care setting, a future best practice could include trainings for staff liaisons in group facilitation and conflict resolution to best prepare for mediating diverse and dominant communication styles in meetings. Of note, all participating clinics had a staff member serve as either the group facilitator or co-facilitator.…”

Seeking Newborn Information as a Resource for Maternal Support

“…The CenteringPregnancy Ò program provides such a model, in which expectant mothers attend perinatal group classes with self-directed health checkups, usually at the end of each class (Walker & Worrell, 2008). These classes offer many opportunities for expectant women to ensure proper selfmanagement for health while, at the same time, to benefit from having others available for discussion of issues.…”

Women׳s views on partnership working with midwives during pregnancy and childbirth

“…The practice of group antenatal sessions has been tried in other areas and is referred to as CenteringPregnancy® (Walker et al, 2008 From the midwives' perspective it is clear that this would be a more effective way of managing time than by continuing with the individual discharge planning. For the women the benefit is that they would all benefit from the questions that other women may ask.…”

“…The visits are longer, lasting for around ninety minutes and are scheduled ten times during pregnancy (Walker, et al, 2008). This approach, known as CenteringPregnancy®, was recently piloted in Australia where it was found to increase maternal satisfaction and provided opportunities for social support, friendship as well as education and care (Teate et al, 2011).…”