Bridget Sheeran: community midwife in West Cork, works with women having home and hospital births as well as those planning Caesarean births.
As a community midwife working on contract for the Southern Area Health Board, I have to be on call for the mothers-to-be that I tend to for home births.
I take on one or two mothers per month myself and am the secondary or back-up midwife for another mother-to-be.
Usually, the women are very good at putting me on the alert that labour may be imminent so I have time to plan ahead to have my children picked up from school and playschool and to re-organise the other work I do which includes antenatal classes and aquanatal exercise classes.
Generally, people are very understanding if I have to cancel a class or an appointment because a baby is about to be born. People enjoy being part of the excitement of a new arrival.
Women call me when they feel labour is starting and depending on what is happening I go straight away or plan to be with her when she calls me again, often that night.
I give antenatal classes in the mornings to pregnant women and in the evenings to the pregnant women and their partners.
I work with women having home and hospital births as well as those planning to have a Caesarean birth. The aim of the classes, which are based on the Birthing from Within philosophy, is to inform and empower women about their choices in labour and to teach them coping practices for birth and afterwards.
The fathers-to-be come because they want to know best how to support their partners in labour.
In my aquanatal classes, which I run with a physiotherapist, we teach pregnant women how to maintain their suppleness as they get heavier. Correcting posture problems while pregnant and maintaining a flexibility can help labour proceed more easily.
I also run a postnatal group called Babytalk. In this group, it is wonderful to see how women love to share their experiences and learn from each other. We cover subjects such as baby massage, feeding, weaning and the challenges of motherhood. As a qualified homeopath, I also offer mothers and babies homeopathic remedies for natural resolution of any physical or emotional discomforts.
One long-term aim of mine is to set up a birth centre in West Cork where women can go to have their babies in a more holistic environment. At the moment, I am doing a feasibility study on this project as it's something I'm very passionate about.
Recently, I was asked to go into Schull Community College in Schull, Co Cork to speak to students in transition year about my work. I really enjoyed this work and felt it was a wonderful opportunity for both the girls and boys to ask why people use homeopathic medicines and to meet a local midwife attending local births.
Midwifery is all about the natural processes of pregnancy and childbirth. It was great to give teenagers a sense of perspective on these issues and explain that things can go well in pregnancy and childbirth rather than the common expectation that things will go wrong and that childbirth is a traumatic experience which will always require the intervention of a medical team in a hospital.