A couple of midwifery resources

There are a couple of really exciting initiatives that have arisen, in part, out of our new programme development and both have come about through grants that were awarded for their development.

Midwifery Junction
This is a really exciting resource for midwives in New Zealand who have links to our schools of midwifery. They may be interested in postgraduate study or they may be working with students. It pulls together educational resources, links to online sites of interest and also provides a forum for discussion for midwives and for students. It also provides information to women who are interested in midwifery education, either because they are keen to have a student involved in their birth experience or because they are interested in being a midwife.

Second life birthing centre
This is an initiative that was started by Sarah Stewart and has been a work in progress in collaboration with the SLENZ group and midwifery lecturers, principally in Otago but also in other schools around New Zealand. A virtual birthing unit is being developed which will ultimately be a fantastic learning resource for students, women and also for midwives.

Lactation conference online: Gold 09

As part of my role as a midwife working in a rural maternity unit I have been enrolled in a lactation course. I have only just enrolled and have not traveled very far with the course yet, however there are a couple of things I want to comment on at the moment.

The course has been developed by a group called Health E learning and has been developed on the Moodle platform. This interests me as we are developing our new midwifery programme through Moodle. The course looks professional and engaging and may have some ideas which I can incorporate into the work I am doing.

Health E learning seem to be a commercial group who are engaged with producing learning resources for lactation consultants. These courses are available for a fee. I realise that there is a cost in developing these resources, however it does seem a shame that only those who can afford to pay will have access to them. In my case my employer is paying.

The Health e learning group are running an online conference (Gold 09)which can be attended, once again for a fee. As they say, the cost will be significantly cheaper than actually flying overseas and attending a conference. I am very interested to see how this goes and to find out how the networking opportunities compare with face to face opportunities at a conference.

It is exciting to see that rural health groups are taking advantage of the learning opportunities afforded by the internet. This is the third year that the Gold conference has been run but it is the first time I have heard of it. I think this is a great initiative and hope that all midwives have an opportunity to attend, supported by there employers, not only with the fees but also with time off for the conference.

I will let you know how i go with the course as I work through it.

Image: woman breast feeding baby, from hdptcar's photos on flickr.com

NZCOM conference

I am off to another conference this weekend. The New Zealand college of midwives conference. This is my opportunity to share my research with my NZ Midwifery Colleages and to see if there is any interest in a rural midwives network in New Zealand. I have been busily changing and adapting my presentation to reflect this audience and to gage interest in this concept. I will post again on my return and discuss this idea further then. In the mean time if you have any interest in a rural midwives network or a rural midwives practice community leave me a comment with your thoughts.

Christine Webb at Otago Polytechnic

On Thursday I had the honour of meeting Christine Webb. Christine is the executive editor of Journal of Advanced Nursing, a prestigious international journal of nursing. Christine is also the professor of health studies at the University of Plymouth in the UK.
Christine was here to speak with staff at Otago Polytechnic about "growing a profession through research".

Her lecture discussed the various types of research. She suggested that we should not undervalue quantitative research in nursing, midwifery and allied health fields. She mentioned the preference that is often expressed in these areas for qualitative research and suggested that this is not always as well conducted or as rigorous as it could be. She spoke of the importance of looking at a phenomenon under study from more than one perspective, "triangulation". Christine also stressed the value of systematic review and suggested that this is something that we as educators could do to within our fields to support dissemination of evidence.

Christine discussed the importance of practice based on the best available evidence and spoke of research into evidence based practice which highlights the preference, in all health fields, for gaining knowledge and information from colleagues and other contacts. There is a tendency, when this is the case, for traditional practices to be promoted without good supporting evidence. This can lead to practices which have been proven to be ineffective, or even harmful, being continued in practice. She gave examples of this, for example pressure area care. This relates to my own research which found a similar preference amongst rural midwives, some of whom had small groups with whom they shared information and some of whom did not have this opportunity. The challenge is to get information about evidence for practice to these groups to support change in practice. However I do not believe it is enough to only get the information out there. In many instances I beleive it is important for some role modeling of the new practice to be available. For example one of the participants in my study commented that she would like to start using a sterile water block for lower back pain in labour. This is something that has been known about for some time but she has never seen it done in practice and so feels unable to take that step and try it in practice herself.

Christine suggested that one answer is for educators to get out into the workplace and make themselves known, being a resource for evidence for practice. I can see this is something that might help in some way but I think we need greater recognition of the importance of social networks and communities of practice (COP) to learning, we need to find innovative ways to utilise COP to disseminate information and evidence and we need to find way for role modeling innovations based on evidence. I see online resources as one way in which this might be achieved.

Beating the open access drum

Sarah Stewart has blogged about meeting with midwives from Pakistan and the exchange of ideas that occurred in this online meeting. I expect these midwives discovered her through her Blog? It seems to me that reaching the wider audience is one of the great things about blogging. I wonder if any of these midwives blog?

I think it is exciting to explore midwifery in other contexts. Perhaps in the future there might be resources we can share which will be beneficial for anyone. For example the Christchurch medical school have a lovely interactive animation about pharmacology (http://www.icp.org.nz/). There are many videos that apply to clinical midwifery some of which I have linked in the Wiki I have created for midwifery. Certainly we need always to be aware of the context of midwifery practice. We cannot assume that what we do and teach here will be of any benefit at all to midwives in other countries. None the less I am sure that there is a great deal of material that is relevant. Reflection is a great way to learn and, if the material does not exactly match the situation in another country, the midwives or students can reflect on this difference and discuss it. Providing material online with a creative commons license which allows them to use and adapt the material to their own needs is even better. They can then take the material and make if fit their own situation.

We are fortunate in Otago Polytechnic that our management support us to do this. Their are no barriers to us producing and creating online freely available courses and our education development centre have led the way with the course I am currently enrolled in, Design for Flexible Learning Practice and others. The challenge is therefore ours. How do we make this a reality within our own discipline?

Image: Drummer Billy Cobham at Womad. From Pix Gremlin's photos on Flickr.com

We have a second life midwives group

We now have a second life midwives group. Today Sarah (Petal) and I(Dacary) met with Sufia (a Uk midwife) in Second life. This was on a UK education Island, not sure which one). Sufia has been in Second Life for about one year now and has more knowledge about it than Petal or I. We met in a church that her husband has been creating. That is him on the right.

We managed to get voice communication going and we were able to actually talk to one another which was fantastic. Sarah and Sufia (SL name)had a lot in common as they had both been involved in establishing email lists for midwives in the past. The international midwifery community is really very small and it is not too hard to come up with people that you know in common.

Sufia also took us to a conference area on this Island and explained that the billboards can be changed to have postings which are more suitable for midwives or educators or whoever the group is that is meeting at the time. I do realise that I still have lots to learn in Second Life. It took a long time for me to get my voice activation going as I had lost the buttons, which are usually on the bottom toolbar, and had to reset them. With Sufia's help I managed to do this. For a while I was just there, while the others were talking, and I could not participate, a bit of a frustration which people who are struggling with getting to grips with second life might not be able to tolerate. It is quite a learning curve but I am becoming increasing convinced that it is worth the effort, to be able to collaborate and communicate in this environment.

If you are keen to join the Second Life midwives group you will first need to join second life. Then search for groups and request to join the group. Perhaps one of the things we can discuss when we all get together is how we might use this group? Will we have regular meetings of the group and where might these take place? Does anyone have any ideas about this?

One of the really exciting things is that Sufia's husband is quite skilled in construction in second life and Sufia herself has also been building. Sufia's husband, Vidz Ah, is creating the Church in the first photo here. This could be useful if we decide we need to construct a place for midwives, and if he is willing to help.

Learning communities online.

This post is in response to a blogpost by Sarah Stewart. We have recently been investigating how to use online resources to provide students with a sense of connection and a sense of being a learning community. I think this is what the facilitating online learning communities course we have been working on is all about really. Learning is definitely enhanced through community interaction and I think face to face will always be optimal,how can we help people feel that sense of connection and shared learning when they cannot physically be together in the same space. Do you think we have that sense of community in our facilitating online course? I think it has happened to a degree, but perhaps the sense of a learning community might be greater when the learning goals are also shared to a greater extent. Our course participants have come form a variety of practice areas representing a variety of professional groups and have been participating in the course for a variety of reasons, so perhaps it is quite astonishing that we have managed to achieve a sense of community at all. When we are working with distance students who are working together to learn specific skills towards a shared learning goal perhaps there will be a greater opportunity to develop an online sense of community. I wonder what others feel about this?