Essay: The Essential Roles of Heart, Hands, and Mind in Midwifery

This essay delves into the core components of midwifery: heart, hands, and mind, emphasizing their interconnectedness in providing comprehensive care to pregnant women. The 'heart' embodies kindness and respect, focusing on women-centered care. 'Hands' represent the expertise and practical skills, including healing touch. 'Mind' signifies philosophical practice, knowledge, and efficiency for safe practice. The essay highlights the relationship between midwives and women, built on trust and compassion, and explores the ethical considerations, emotional support, and the practical skills required for effective midwifery. It also addresses the importance of continuous learning, research, and adapting to individual needs, even in challenging situations like miscarriages, where midwives play a crucial role in providing psychological support. The essay concludes that these three elements are essential for a midwife to work as a professional care.

Running head: ESSAY MIDWIFERY
Essay Midwifery
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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This is to be noted that Midwifery gets globally acknowledged as the profession in the
contemporary context. It can be stated that the midwife is the professional specialist who take
care of the woman during her pregnancy, delivery and the postpartum (Healy Humphreys and
Kennedy 2016). Midwives are the artists who use their heart, hands and mind to create a perfect
art piece. This article will highlight heart, hands and mind as the important factors of
midwifery by suggesting how each factor is linked with each other while the midwives are
working with the pregnant women. The factor 'heart' includes the chief morals of kindness,
regard for the females kid by denoting significance of women oriented care. The factor 'hands'
concentrate both on the expertise and practice in terms of methods and healing touch of the
midwives. The factor 'mind' denotes philosophical and principled practice, and the efficiency
needed for safe practice attained by the knowledge.
This can be said that the relationship of trust, compassion and dependence between
the midwives are women highlights the factor called heart. The dependency of the pregnant
women on the midwives evoke significant self-confidence in midwives. On the other hand, the
midwife has to depend on the women she is dealing with to understand what will be significant
for her mind and body. It is to be noted that the midwives take the proper care of the pregnant
women along with perfect clinical skills and knowledge and fruitful references (Edvardsson
et al. 2015). Therefore, this can easily be stated that a relationship of mutual faith, affection and
respect takes place between a pregnant woman and a midwife.
This is to be stated that the significant sociologist and theorist Pelvin highlighted the role
of a midwife as of honor (Tharpe, Farley and Jordan 2016). It can be said that the pregnancy
period is significantly personal and emotional period for a woman who is about to give birth to a
child. The woman carries uncountable memories of this particular period throughout her life.

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Therefore, the relationship between a pregnant woman and midwife grows during this
emotional and personal period remain always special. It is to be noted that the biological
process of birth and the significant post birth relation between a mother and her baby is assisted
and eased by the midwife. However, the role of midwife does not come to conclude here. The
midwife plays a vital role to help the particular woman to understand herself and her significant
relationship with the family members. According to the Australian Nursing and Midwifery
Council, the ethics of benevolence and love to self and the others signify the essential moral
of a midwife (Fisher 2017). The midwives require to respect the principle rights and the
significant choices of the mother in order make her practice morally and culturally accepted.
The midwife should always have a mild, understanding, loving and caring approach to earn
trust from the people.
The work of midwifery depends on the perfect balance between a professional
approach with proper skills and expertise and the emotions include love and care. Hunter
stated that expressing love and sharing emotions with the other people is precious in both
ways for developing the relationship and enhancing a proper sort of practice that is
facilitated with grace and care (Williamson 2016). The relationship between a midwife and
woman is not only a customer-dealer relation. It is beyond of that as the pillar of relationship
is made by the mutual love and respect during the essential period of a woman’s life. This is
to be mentioned that the outcome of the pregnancy may not be good and leads to miscarriages.
It is significantly important for a midwife to support the woman and her family with sense of
rationality and care during that period of crisis.
This to be stated that the hands in the work of midwifery need to meant for healing
touch. The significant healing touch offers the sense of safety to the woman with the perfect

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information that the midwife she selected is confident in her activities and profound to her
requirements (Soundy 2015). It can be said that hands can express love, confidence, care and
expertise even in the situations a circumstances where the words cannot. The utilization of
the healing touch in multiple forms comprising near connection for physical support, assisting
the pregnant woman to manage her significant pose and postures or staying there as a
support system to rely on. This is to be noted that the significant curative touch can initiate
multiple reactions by multiple women. It can be a good message with the assurance of relieving
significant pain for few women. This can also be a simple message of pledge that the midwife
will not leave her alone and boost her throughout the period.
This is to be noted that the midwives often utilize ‘palpitations and touch’ experiments
of the woman’s abdomen to understand and direct the growth, size and position and the
well-being of the would-be baby (Basiri et al. 2016). This capability of midwives is
acknowledged as the significant 'hands on' expertise. The other expertise of using the hands
comprise measurement of blood pressure, breast feeding, helping the woman during the
pregnancy and delivery, baby evaluations and helping the newborn and the significant
utilization of epidurals. As per the Code of Professional Conduct for Midwives in Australia,
2006, love and care are not the only things the midwives should be aware of. It is not safe to take
help for the local midwives without skills and proper knowledge (Moloney and Gair 2015).
This is important to learn the process and exercise the practice in order to be an expertise and a
professional to work in this profession. The responsibility of a midwife is to offer antenatal
and parenting education (Thorstensson et al. 2015). The midwives should be committed to
work as a profession to offer essential support and sufficient advices to the significant pregnant
woman due to her pregnancy, delivery and the postpartum stage. The responsibilities of the

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midwives should also include the care and recognitions of the complex situations, preferment
of normal delivery and having the access to do medical interventions and do the needful if
emergency takes place.
This is a common expectation of pregnant women to stay in an optimistic and vibrant
environment during pregnancy. However, there are significant number of women who have to
have their children in an unwanted atmosphere of the typical hospitals. Therefore, it is
significantly important for a midwife to evoke a sense of positivity in the childbearing woman by
decreasing her stress, discarding her fear and anxiety and giving her the sense of security.
Significant theorists McCandish and Page stated that the midwives should offer an extra
effort to transform even the hospital room in a beautiful place. It can be done by vacating space
in the room by shifting furniture and decorate the place with simple and beautiful things. This is
important to offer pillows to the women to lean on during labor pain. This can be said that the
roles of midwives are multiple and different. The hands play a vital role in the role play of
midwives (Sechrist 2017).
It can be said that the Mind is the third and important factor in midwifery service. This is
to be noted that the midwifery needs to be learned with the scientific instances and theories by
the respective organizations and by individual experiments. It is not enough to learn the skills.
This is also important to understand the lessons, to evaluate what the person has learnt and to
execute the gained into activities as per the philosophy of Australian College of Midwives.
This knowledge and learned skills offer the midwives to research and experimentation to the next
level for the development of the midwifery profession. It is to be mentioned that Page and
McCandish stated that description of example or proof-based clinical performance (Toth,
2017).They also mentioned that the practice needs to be done with the sensible use of the perfect

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instances. This can be said that the midwives should be liable to meet the significant
requirements of the particular women who is carrying a baby in her womb.
It can be said that the occasion of birth is a natural event. Therefore, the pregnant
woman is not to be considered as the diseased person. However, she always needs an extra care
from a responsible and professionally skilled person to be with her till her baby comes to the
world. Therefore, the education for midwifery service include antennal classes and data
regarding how to take care of a woman during pregnancy (Darwin, Galdas and Hinchliff
2015). It can be said that the significant education requires to move to the customer-based
agenda.
It can be easily be stated from the above discussion that heart, hands and the mind
play significant and interlinked roles in the model of midwifery care. This is difficult to
define one single area as the singular element in order to define and evaluate this specific care.
These three factors are essential for a midwife to work as a professional care. The significant
researches state that the midwives play a pivotal role in offering care to pregnant women and
help to stay strong in crisis period and lead them to have a healthy baby. However, exceptions
take place. There are significant cases where women have to experience miscarriages. The role
of the midwives in such crucial point of time is even difficult yet important. It can be said that
during pregnancy and few months after pregnancy or due to miscarriages the midwives have also
to play a role of psychologist help along with the professional help to the woman.

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Reference:
Basiri, M., Bastani, F., Haghani, H., & Rahmatnejad, l. (2016). Effect of slow-stroke
back massage on anxiety of older women with breast cancer undergoing chemotherapy.
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