Improving outcomes through respectful patient-centred care

I think...

Respectful care is one of those concepts that sounds simple until you really stop and think about it.

For me, respectful care begins with recognizing that every woman has a story long before she enters our consultation room.

Pregnancy doesn't erase who she is, her fears, her culture.

or the experience that she has lived before.

So let me tell you that respect means understanding those differences rather than expecting everybody to fit into one category of the same model.

The woman will remember us, will remember how we treat her, and trauma-informed care actually remind us that we don't always know what happened before to that woman, to that family.

So I think STELLA is not just a concept about, you know, taking care of the experience of the woman.

I think also take into account how she expects to be treated during labor and delivery and how that family and that culture fit into our healthcare system.

This is a big concept, I know, but I think it's where we are heading now in our definition.

Yeah, and I would agree with all of that.

I think that's a lovely definition.

And I think this notion of citing the woman and her family in her life experience, and possibly even the life experience of her own parents, because people inherit things through the family, inherit knowledge and knowledge.

expectations through the family as well, don't they? And also, I think people sometimes think that trauma-informed care is about birth trauma.

But of course, many people come to pregnancy, labour and birth with adverse childhood experiences, things that have happened in their past that aren't directly related to maternity care necessarily, but which get triggered potentially by what happens to them during their maternity episode.

And I would also add, and I think you meant this anyway, Jazee, but I would also add that in the UK at the moment, we have a lot of emphasis on so-called listening to women.

But the problem is it's not just listening to women, it's doing something about the listening to the women.

And it seems to be that it's quite straightforward to do something when what the women ask for is what we normally provide anyway.

But if what they want or need, and they don't always express what they need sometimes, we have to work it out, but if they want or need is something which is so-called out of guidelines or something a bit a bit unusual that takes a lot of time and effort to process and sometimes it's not even possible to provide within a you know a publicly funded service necessarily or even a privately funded service but it's about taking the time to sit with the woman and say okay this we can't do but let's work through what might be right for you with your family history and your expectations and your beliefs and your values that we can provide between us so that we get some kind of respectful, mutually respectful compromise.

So respectful care is not just about us respecting the woman.

It's about building a relationship such that there's mutual respect so that we can go together to provide the kind of care that actually is affordable and sustainable, but also right for each individual.

And can I say, you just say something very important.

Is that the same woman? I mean, we are facing a woman that is in the most, potentially, is the most vulnerable moment in their life.

I mean, she's not the same woman that the last year before, right? She have new fears.

She's facing new hopes.