Midwife as Counsellor: Midwives' Experiences Counselling Women Through Pregnancy, Birth and the Early Postpartum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Pregnancy and childbirth are transformative life experiences that can create or exacerbate significant emotional, physical, social, and relational challenges. Midwives help women to feel confident and knowledgeable, to cope with anxiety and fear, and to prepare for considerable shifts of identity, responsibility, and family life. Research shows that counselling has the potential to positively impact women’s birth experiences and outcomes; however, less is known about how midwives understand and experience their role in counselling women. Methods: In the current study, nine practicing midwives in British Columbia, Canada, participated in a semi-structured interview. Interview transcripts were coded for themes. Results: Five themes emerged from the qualitative analysis of the interview responses, including: counselling as “part of the job”, the importance of “meeting people where they are at”, feeling that “sometimes we’re out of our depths”, “learning by doing”, and the importance of “taking care of the midwife.” Discussion: Findings from this study suggest that counselling is a prevalent part of midwifery care in British Columbia. Future studies should focus on exploring the impact of midwives’ accessibility to their clients when specialized counselling services are not available, collaborative ways for midwives to participate with mental health professionals in the broader community, and tailoring professional development for midwives in both health and mental health counselling. This article has been peer-reviewed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".