I am so excited to share the news that my peer-reviewed article for the journal Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care has been published! If you're a student or are affiliated with a university, you can access the full article for free through your library's database. If not, you can at least read the abstract for free at this link https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/birt.12853 or find it through Pub Med.
I never really had the goal of getting published in a scholarly journal, but I felt I might have something to contribute after attending the Quality Maternal and Newborn Care Research Alliance's Calabash Cafe in September 2023. The topic for that meeting was Critical Midwifery Studies, which absolutely drew the academic part of me's curiosity. The discussion was really interesting as it was essentially a push for everyone involved in midwifery care, including parents and doulas, to help establish a framework for the field of midwifery to start being more self-critical in order to make improvements. This topic combined my former life as an academic, who participated in plenty of theory discussions, with my new career in the birth world.
At the end of the discussion, the moderators shared that they had teamed up with the journal Birth to put out a special issue on this new field of Critical Midwifery Studies, and the journal was still accepting manuscripts for consideration until the end of the year. At the urging of my good friend and midwife, Katie Page, I started brainstorming ideas for an article, going back to my research roots, and drafting my manuscript. I submitted it at the end of 2023 and then began the long process of waiting to hear back from the journal editors. For those who aren't familiar with how scholarly publishing works, each step in the process can take an eternity: from preparing the article, submitting it, hearing back, addressing feedback from multiple anonymous peer reviewers and revising the manuscript multiple times, to finally doing the various licensing agreements and paperwork. It's not for the faint of heart!
But finally, after 8 months, the article is published!
In a nutshell, my goal with this article was to get midwives, particularly those who practice in a more traditional clinical and hospital-based setting, to think about all forms of communication and how that affects a client's experience, even in simple prenatal appointments. This can include things like lighting, signage, furniture, what's on the walls, and what sounds someone hears. When we think about communication, it's usually limited to what words we use, but we can think more broadly than that, because every part of an encounter sends some kind of message, whether it be positive or negative.
P.S. It is wild to see my name on Pub Med!
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