Supporting women seeking care outside guidance
Personalised care is safer care, providing women with choice and control and improves clinical outcomes for them and their babies. Midwives support informed decision making, but sometimes women choose care options that sit outside guidance.
Role of the midwife
Midwives have a key role as an advocate and facilitator of women’s choices around the care they receive and where they receive it. This is particularly important when women and families are negotiating fragmented and under-resourced healthcare systems. Those systems bring challenges to midwives too, as they often have insufficient time to provide the high-quality care they would like to give.
RCM advice on care outside guidance
The RCM’s advice around care outside guidance provides midwives with guiding principles on facilitating personalised care and women’s choices, including when those choices fall outside clinical recommendations. Personalised care requires a relationship of mutual trust between a woman and her midwife, and multi-disciplinary collaboration, often facilitated by models of midwifery continuity of carer (MCoC). This RCM guidance helps support midwives working in different models and includes indications on how to support the implementation of personalised care and support plans (PCSP) for women seeking choices that fall outside medical recommendations. It is underpinned by the principles of consent as a fundamental right of individuals and by the changes in UK law due the landmark ruling of Montgomery v Lanarkshire.
This guidance looks to address those barriers by providing the knowledge necessary to midwives to feel able to provide personalised care. It was developed by the RCM with input from an independent advisory group of experts on the topic, from consultant midwives to academics.
RCM briefing on informed decision making
Individuals must be provided with the expert advice and support that they would like, in order to understand the care, treatment and support options available to them. Receiving this advice and support enables women to make informed decisions about their health.
This briefing provides guidance on how to facilitate the informed decision-making process in daily practice and understand the underpinning regulatory and legal principles
