Highlights
- •This article reviewed midwifery professional documents revealing a limited reference to woman centred care.
- •Due to the lack of a uniform definition, the concept, at this time, remains widely interpreted.
- •Despite midwifery practice being woman centred, a definition of the concept has limited attention within the peer-reviewed evidence.
- •Woman centred care is mostly referred to through an operational lens, and at this time, there is no clear universally accepted definition.
- •However, it is purported that woman centred care underpins midwifery philosophy.
Abstract
Background
Woman centred care is purported to underpin Midwifery philosophy. However, the evidence
and focus of this concept within midwifery professional standards has yet to be verified.
Further to this, woman centred care is, at this time, mostly depicted as a way of
assisting, supporting and interacting with a woman and her family. It is however,
without a substantive universally accepted definition.
Objective
This study aimed to review midwifery standards documents. An organised and targeted
methodology was conducted to identify the approaches to woman centred care that currently
underpin midwifery governance.
Methods
A comprehensive and specific search for ‘woman centred care’ was conducted across
a global collection of midwifery standards. A professional document was included if
it represented either or all of the underpinnings of midwifery education, contained
statements related to standards of practice, overall governance or any equivalence.
Individual documents were initially searched for the words ‘woman centred care’, followed
by ‘women centred care’, ‘patient/person centred care’ and ‘client centred care’.
Findings
An extensive review of 142 documents was undertaken. These included: thirty independent
nations, thirty represented by the European Midwives Association and a further twenty-one
identified through the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM). The World Health
Organisation (WHO), yielded midwifery information from a further sixty-one nations.
The phrase ‘woman centred care’ was located within 3.5% of the documents reviewed.
Overall, five examples were found that directly referred to the actual phrase ‘woman
centred care’ and one to the use of ‘person centred care’. Therefore, it was established,
that at the time of this review, there was limited formal depiction of the concept
of woman centred care.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 04, 2021
Accepted:
February 22,
2021
Received in revised form:
February 21,
2021
Received:
October 8,
2020
Identification
Copyright
© 2021 Australian College of Midwives. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
