The Tribune

By ELLA ANDERSON

What happens to children before they are born and in their early years profoundly affects their future health and well-being.

Midwives are crucial members of the health team, well placed to help every child make the best start in life. Their health promotion and disease prevention work improves maternity outcomes and long-term health gains. They address the individual and social health determinants such as breast feeding, smoking and drinking, and social and behavioural origins. They are powerful agents of change for a sustainable future.

Midwives are professionals who specialise in pregnancy, childbirth, post-postpartum period, women's sexual and reproductive health and newborns.

Pregnancy, birth and the post-postpartum period are some of the most profoundly transformational experiences a woman goes through in her life. Midwives recognise this as a normal and healthy time. A time of growth, excitement and wonder, but also full of changes and uncertainty that requires guidance along the way. Being a midwife means "being with woman" as a clinical care provider, guide, witness to her process, loving presence and guardian of her baby's well-being, emotionally, physically and spiritually.

The process of birthing a baby is incredibly challenging work, but work that holds great potential for being the most rewarding and empowering experience in a woman's life. Women need to feel safe and supported in order to completely surrender and trust the process, allowing them to do the work required to make space for the emergence of a new soul. Midwives help to make this possible.

International Midwives Day is celebrated every year on a global level to commemorate and increase the awareness of the contribution of the midwives towards the patients all over the world. May 5 was established to be celebrated as a day to honour the midwives for their big contribution towards the health of their nations. In addition, it focuses on how midwives ensure women and their newborns navigate pregnancy and childbirth safely. Also, how they receive respectful and well-resourced maternity care that can create a lifetime of good health and well-being beyond the childbirth continuum.

This day is celebrated with great enthusiasm and joy in more than 50 countries around the world, including the Bahamas.

The first International Day of the Midwife (IDM) was launched and celebrated in 1991 using the theme "Towards Safe Birth for All by the Year 2000". The day was established to be celebrated on annual basis to fulfil the demand of following theme "The World Needs Midwives Now More Than Ever".

The theme for this year's event, "Midwives Leading the Way with Quality Care", is a fitting one, as life for the newborn in most cases begins and ends with the midwife. The theme resonates with the first of the International Confederation of Midwives' three directions established in the 2017-2020 strategy as Quality, Equality, leadership.

The Midwives Association of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas has been in existence since 2005. We believe every woman has a right to:

• Equitable, ethical, accessible quality care

• Healthcare that respects human dignity and individuality

• Complete and accurate information to make informed decisions

• Self-determination and active participation in healthcare decisions

• Involvement of a woman's designated family members, to extend desired, in all healthcare experiences

Midwives in the Bahamas, come together at this time to celebrate ourselves and share our midwifery teachings with each other, to be together and laugh together. We hope to find balance and peace in these collective reflections on our special day. Happy Midwives Day!

• Ella Anderson is a registered nurse and midwife, and the president of the Midwives Association of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.