We were so thrilled when Madeline Murray, of Believe in Midwifery, offered to be on our nascent podcast a couple months ago. We decided to include a podcast as part of our partnership as a means to reaching not only home birth parents, but also midwives and student midwives, in order to include them in the conversation about midwifery–what it is, what we do, why we do it, and how can we do it better. Because we were creating a partnership out of a deep desire to create a sustainable practice, it has been front and center of our intention from the get-go. So, talking about sustainable midwifery with Madeline was a real treat.

Madeline delves into why sustainable midwifery has been a priority for her even as a student midwife. She discusses the impact of the traditional (aka unsustainable) approach to community midwifery practice, and how creating a more sustainable model on her clinical placement actually allowed her to keep going and become a midwife. She goes on to talk about how she made group practice work in her new practice, and suggests a model on-call schedules for consideration.

This journey of sustainable midwifery ultimately has led Madeline to create a course for midwives: Believe in Midwifery’s Guide to Sustainable Practice. This course gives you an overview of what sustainability means, why sustainable midwifery practice is important, and ideas for how to make it work for your own practice. The course is more about figuring out how this might work for you, with a focus on self-awareness, more than business ideas and structures. She also includes information about how to create sustainability even without a practice partner.

You can watch Madeline’s presentation from the 2016 MANA Conference here:

We hope you’ll tune into the podcast and dig deeper into what Madeline has to offer. This kind of thinking outside the box can really transform community midwifery practice in such a way that we can serve more birthing people and make the difference we know midwifery can make in the lives of individuals.