Common Sense Pregnancy by Jeanne Faulkner

Author:Jeanne Faulkner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2015-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

At the Hospital

It’s go time, the big day, your birth day. This section covers all the need-to-know items you’ll deal with during labor and birth, from who works on the maternity unit to what your nurse and midwife really think about your bikini line. Buckle your seatbelts and let’s get going. You’re having your baby.

Who works on the maternity unit? From nurses to lab techs—all the people who might take care of you and your baby

If you’re delivering your baby in a hospital maternity unit, know this: It takes a village to birth a baby—a village of health care workers and support staff whose individual jobs are interconnected to provide comprehensive patient care and support the hospital’s administrative and technical needs. While you won’t meet all of these people during your hospital stay, you’ll definitely interact with quite a few. Who are the people in your hospital’s village?

Doctors:

• Obstetricians (OB-GYNs) generally see patients in their offices for prenatal care and in hospitals when their patients are ready to deliver or have a C-section. The doctor who takes care of you in the hospital might be the same one you’ve seen throughout your pregnancy or might be one of her partners. OBs aren’t on call and available every day or night of the week to deliver their own patients. Instead, they rotate call shifts with other OBs so they can get some sleep and have a life.

• Hospitalists (aka laborists) are doctors that work on some maternity units. Their job is to take care of women in labor while they’re admitted to the hospital. They don’t do prenatal care, so you may not have met your hospitalist prior to delivery. They are responsible for supervising labors, delivering babies, managing postpartum issues, doing C-sections, and taking care of triage patients who come in for reasons other than labor and delivery. The advantage of having a hospitalist is that he’s focused exclusively on what’s happening in the hospital and therefore not distracted by office patients or patients on other units. He also may not be as eager to implement interventions meant to speed labor along, because he’s not in a hurry. He’s there for the whole shift. He has a specific work schedule, so he won’t have been awake for days on end managing patients in the office and in the hospital. Hospitalists often do fewer C-sections because they’re located on the maternity unit (not dashing back and forth from home to office to hospital, like most OBs) and more able to take a wait-and-see approach. What’s the disadvantage? Because you probably haven’t met this doctor before, you won’t know his style or personality or how he practices. He may also be juggling several labor patients at once, so he may be distracted and not fully focused on you.

• Perinatologists are obstetricians who specialize in the care of fetuses and complicated, high-risk pregnancies. Perinatology is also known as maternal-fetal medicine. They’re the docs who work with diabetic patients, manage multiple pregnancies (twins, triplets), and do fetal surgery, amniocentesis, and chorionic villus sampling.

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