WORKING AS A COORDINATOR MIDWIFE IN A TERTIARY ...

Coordinators take their emotional work home with them; however they do not perceive
this as a burden, rather it is something that happens which they put into context. Sleep is
interrupted for some coordinators as they work their way through and ‘make sense of’
their experiences. They reveal having found their personal ways of debriefing and
destressing, which may be through physical exercise, journaling experiences or talking to
someone they trust.
Yet, there is also a sense of helplessness revealed in their experiences and it is hard to
accept that the relentlessness of the demands of their job has no ill effects for
coordinators. They are all regularly placed in unenviable situations which are not of their
making and over which they have no control. They have to take on caseloads as well as
coordinating shifts with all that this role entails. There is a concerning theme of ‘nobody
died today’.
It is their lived reality in this study that even when they contact a manager, ultimately it is
often up to them to find an immediate solution to situations they find themselves in,
whether it is leaving a woman alone who is bleeding with placenta praevia, asking a
husband to watch the fetal monitoring in the absence of a midwife or leaving a new LMC
to manage alone because there is no one else to call on for help. The feeling that ‘if one
more thing comes through the door it would tip you over the edge’ is the coordinator’s
reality and the questions are asked: do their experiences affect them more than they
currently acknowledge or realize and what happens to a coordinator if or when that does
occur?
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