[TRANSCRIPT OF ANSWER]
Midwifery Model for High-Risk Pregnancy
“If the question is I want to have a midwifery model of care for my pregnancy and hopefully for my birth, what do I do to mitigate certain things because they know that I may have some risk factors that may make a midwife be somewhat cautious about caring for me? The key to maybe solve some of that is seeing who the midwife works with as far as their relationship with an obstetrician. So in speaking to that team, you can get a good sense of whether the midwifery model’s going to be supported throughout versus if you have a certain entity that then occurs in pregnancy like gestation diabetes or your blood pressure becomes slightly elevated. Will that risk you out of that model of midwifery?”
Co-management is Key
“The safety involved in that is how intimate the relationship is or the co-management if you will live with the obstetrician and the midwife. There are some relationships where the obstetrician will risk the patient out at the slightest inkling of something occurring. There are others where there’s more trust in that. There’s more a sense of responsibility. And you can get a sense of that as a consumer when you speak to your providers. And the key is to actually interview them. You know not to go in there intimidated like a church mouse, hoping that you’d be accepted into their practice, but actually to interview them.”
