WORKING AS A COORDINATOR MIDWIFE IN A TERTIARY ...

cohesiveness and teamwork. Alice sums this up well when she comments ‘it’s how you
present yourself when you walk into a room’.
It is not known, whether the combination of coordinators’ leadership skills and
confidence in their midwifery knowledge is perhaps the basis of their levels of resilience,
or is it their work life balance or perhaps their particular personality types? Literature is
available regarding the stress levels midwives experience at work in the hospital setting
(Wells, 2003), but nothing was sourced in relation to their resilience in the current
worldwide climate of shortages of midwives and how they ‘keep going’. The question is
asked: is there a breaking point and what is the potential future cost to that coordinator
who has a life beyond her workplace?
Above all, the partnership model of midwifery care in New Zealand (Guilliland &
Pairman, 1994) is reflected in the spoken and unspoken actions of coordinators in this
study which poses the question whether it is this partnership concept of care with women
which provides coordinators with their strength and mandate to role model sound
midwifery practice within their medicalised, institutionalized work settings?
Recommendations to the profession for practice, education and research
The experiences of the coordinator midwives participating in this study clearly reveal
they are senior practitioners with an expert level of clinical tertiary hospital midwifery
skills. They hold an understanding about normal birth, a commitment to woman focused
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