Rural Texan Mothers Need Midwives: A Literature Review of Midwife-led Care and Inequities of Women’s Healthcare at the State-level.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14574/vk5zhs55Keywords:
midwives, Texas, maternal healthAbstract
Purpose: To analyze research studies comparing midwife-led care to physician-led care and to compare state-regulatory frameworks and policies for midwives and women’s healthcare.
Sample: Fifteen articles published between 2017 and 2022 presenting data on births in the United States.
Method: A keyword search of EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, Wiley Online Library, and PubMed databases. Papers were analyzed if published between 2016-2023, written in English, and studied U.S. populations. A quality appraisal using the John Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice tool and a synthesis approach similar to Perriman et al. (2018) were used to develop objectives for qualifying articles.
Findings: Midwife-led care has lower rates of birthing interventions and increased rates of patient satisfaction than physicians.
Conclusions: Midwives are a crucial resource with adequate research displaying their innate ability to care for women and infants in an empowering and respectful birthing environment. The state of Texas must act to scale-up and utilize this resource to increase access to health care and improve women’s health. Research should be continued to identify stakeholder involvement in advocacy for expanding the midwifery scope of practice and to determine reasoning for the lack of data collection and reporting mechanisms within this field. The need to draft and ratify legislation to either equally regulate midwives of all occupations or to remove collaborative/supervisory frameworks is evident.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share (for non-commerical purposes) the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
